Film Review: A Film Unfinished

Director: Yael Hersonski

A documentary film made in 2010 which looks at the unfinished propaganda film called Das Ghetto made by the Nazis inside the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw. The piece was intended to show the Jewish people in a bad light by showing them as dirty and unclean whilst enjoying a lavish lifestyle of rich food by forcing people to act in different scenes. The Nazis used scare tactics and violence to force these carefully constructed scenes but in the end the film was never actually used.

The propaganda film was shot over 30 days in 1942 just before the transportation of Jews to Treblinka began, the uncut film showed multiple scenes being re-shot with well dressed Jews to ensure the Nazis got the right shot. The well dressed Jews were ordered to ignore begging children in the street and the dead bodies lying in the gutter to make them seem heartless towards one another which couldn't have been further from the truth. It demonstrates the suffering and humiliation that the Jews suffered in the ghetto from a slightly different angle from many other documentaries and films on the subject.

Footage from inside the Warsaw Ghetto

Also shown are interviews with Jewish survivors who speak about the filming in the ghetto and their experiences, these conversations along with black and white videos add to the haunting effect of the entire piece. But the most intriguing interview without a doubt is with Willy Wist who worked as cameraman on Das Ghetto who is asked to recall scenes that he shot. His interview is incredibly uncomfortable as he is evasive about what he actually knew at the time and whether he was purposefully ignorant towards the Jews plight.

The main thought behind the entire film is whether we can trust our own eyes and memories in cases like this?  Do we need cameras and physical footage for a more accurate view on what happened? The film makers do a good job of letting the interviews and footage speak for themselves without trying to express their opinion too greatly. Unfortunately in some cases the footage, whilst upsetting, is hard to distinguish why certain pieces of footage were shown. Possibly for somebody without much knowledge of the Holocaust this would be very useful but for someone with a more in-depth idea of what happened it seems unnecessary.

3/4 Intriguing piece that isn't quite different enough from previous works.