A Film Unfinished A Film Unfinished

In 1942 The Nazi Propaganda Machine Was Hard at Work. 70 Years Later, The Deceit is Finally Unmasked.

Yael Hersonski's powerful documentary achieves a remarkable feat through its penetrating look at another film-the now-infamous Nazi-produced film about the Warsaw Ghetto. Discovered after the war, the unfinished work, with no soundtrack, quickly became a resource for historians seeking an authentic record, despite its elaborate propagandistic construction. The later discovery of a long-missing reel complicated earlier readings, showing the manipulations of camera crews in these "everyday" scenes. Well-heeled Jews attending elegant dinners and theatricals (while callously stepping over the dead bodies of compatriots) now appeared as unwilling, but complicit, actors, alternately fearful and in denial of their looming fate.

documentary foreign

89 mins   More details at IMDb / TMDb

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  • Kano

    Review by Kano ★★★★★

    I’m not sure if I can rate this film at all, with any real sense of perspective. It’s not even something I feel I can review in much depth that would really describe just how haunting and disturbing the content really is.

    Part of the reason I feel I can’t put a rating against the film is because regardless of how the filmmakers pieced this together, there is absolutely no hiding place from the images you see shot by the Nazi’s in the Warsaw Ghetto. We are told that the subject matter is the longest Nazi propaganda film ever made, a document that was never completed and left in deep storage alongside many other autocratic depictions.

    This documentary is mainly…

  • Tony D'Amico

    Review by Tony D'Amico ★★★★

    I had originally heard about this from Jay Cheel on the Film Junk podcast as he gave it praise. And as I am a fan of historical fims and documentaries, I was very pleased to see it was streaming on Netflix.

    It was a great film IMO, that displayed a bit of the atrocities that the Nazi's were capable of during WWII. There really isn't much to say about the topic in ht film....it's about the Nazi's doing terrible things that have been seen before. What makes this unique is that it was a film about a film that the Nazi's were making to show how they treated the Jewish people of the Warsaw ghetto in Poland.

    It was definitely…

  • Jackie Payton

    Review by Jackie Payton ★★★½

    Anything from this moment in history automatically gets my full attention. It was interesting to learn things that I'd never known before.

  • Patrick Sandberg

    Review by Patrick Sandberg ★★★★

    I'm not sure what's worse: the fact that the Nazis thought this absurd propaganda film would turn anyone against the Jews or the idea that it would have.

  • Tyler Baptist

    Review by Tyler Baptist ★★★½

    Interesting and haunting documentary about 'The Ghetto', the unfinished Nazi propaganda film that was staged to show the "contrasts" between Jews living in the Warsaw ghetto. At times hard to watch, A Film Unfinished is a look behind the Nazi propaganda machine and of historical importance.

  • lollygee

    Review by lollygee ★★★½

    Just the most striking images of the Warsaw ghetto or from anything relating to Poland in WW2, really. Nicely constructed documentary, mixing durvivor stories & interviews with footage from a long-lost reel of 'making of' outtakes from Nazi propaganda film 'Das Ghetto'. Hard going as the footage is so compelling & full of hundreds of things going on, it becomes distracting to keep reading the subtitles.

  • NZMorgan

    Review by NZMorgan ★★★

    Interesting, but so slowly paced that it can become fairly boring if you're not fully into it.