"A Film Unfinished" - film by Yael Hersonski. Why "A Film Unfinished" & why credit it to Yael Hersonski? It was perhaps perfectly finished already! Old Chinese proverb: A picture tells a thousand words! This is basically a silent movie - i.e. without words, but it needs no words! With scathing, hateful looks & gestures, privileged persons glare at starving, sick/dying, traumatised children & young & old women & men who have somehow become entangled against their will, within a horrendous environment - interloping into the "precious" lives of the privileged. Whoever made this documentary obviously wished to expose Capitalism - with the obscenity & depravity of wealth, glowing physical beauty & health vs Poverty - with the depraved & deprived extreme social exclusion & powerlessness of lower status. Extreme sadness! But this projection cannot be faked! Not even in Hollywood! While film maker, Yael Hersonski suggests this documentary was for Nazi Propaganda Machine in 1942, I suggest this documentary was made by persons who wished to expose truths - not falsity of propaganda! Who would agree to expose themselves as "capitalist pigs" for the Nazi war machine? Were they also Nazis or Jewish collaborators? Or simply stupid people who really did think they were superior to poor masses? This is the basic understanding of capitalism & accordingly, is no crime. The opposite view is to understand Jesus, Mohammed, Marx & Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Castro, Chavez, etc., etc., etc. I think "A Film Unfinished" was perhaps originally assembled perfectly to defy capitalism in all its degrees .... to expose its depraved power & how it suffocates the poor! But in reality, capitalists ultimately are big-time losers! While the poor physically die in extreme pain & sadness, the rich die - sooner or later - also ... but in extreme mental & soul-strangling torment. Nazis were expert in capitalist tacts! Initially practising euthanasia, they quickly moved to obvious murder - striking against anyone & everyone - rich or poor - like insane creatures! And this is the message of this film! These insanity has no particular ethnicity & is non-discriminatory! While the film's female commentators recall their personal hygiene during the Holocaust, they nevertheless couldn't spare a mouldy crust of bred for an orphaned beggar child who scrounged through filthy faecal/excrement heaps in the streets for sustenance! So who is the Nazi? So humanity behaves humanely towards the vulnerable/powerless! If this is capitalism, I choose communism/socialism - whichever is appropriate to the situation! - extreme or mundane. Actually in this film, one sees German soldiers standing idly by watching the privileged Jews deliberately averting their gaze from the "ugliness of the poor". Do the German soldiers, watching from the sidelines, recognise themselves in the ugly capitalist creatures who in their disdain of the poor, hasten their inevitable fate. Close ups of the film show individual victims of holocaust (viewings of every angle of their shaven heads) - defenceless in their diminishing dignity & pride but nevertheless with underlying defiance. They appear stoically beautiful! In stark contrast, the rich privileged capitalists are perversely ugly despite their obvious wealth! I'm not a believer in conventional god but i understand Escher's "Scapegoat" analogy of God & Satan. Furthermore there were more than Nazi hands that "rocked the cradle"! These are the hypocrites!

"Shtikat Haarchion" or "Geheimsache Ghettofilm" or "A Film Unfinished" is a co-production between Germany and Israel from 2010 that resulted in this 85-minute documentary. Writer and director is Yael Hersonski and this is possibly his most known work. One reason for this may be that films about the years of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust usually attract enough viewers to keep a film from staying entirely unknown, even if you do not really deliver anything new to the subject. Of course, it's also not easy to do the latter as so many documentaries about this already exist. But luckily this one here does bring something new to the table, namely interesting information about a German propaganda film. That one was supposed to be made at the Warsaw ghetto and depict Jews as people living in the ghetto in order to convince Germans and audiences that even in the ghettos life isn't bad at all for them and maybe increase hate towards Jews even further. I am not entirely sure if this propaganda movie got made or still exists today (in fragments?), but thanks to this documentary we find out a bit about the backgrounds and circumstances of the production. I still believe it is really difficult to make a 90-minute film about a film of under an hour, so there were moments when I felt they could have been left out of this documentary piece. Anyway, it is still a good watch overall, mostly thanks to all the old footage that leaves a lasting impression and there are still some touching moments at times, even if I felt the film did not manage to make the emotional impact it tried to make, at least on me. Nonetheless, I am not surprised by all the awards recognition it received, also in the United States, even if it did not get nominated for an Oscar. I think it deserved awards recognition, but it was maybe a bit too much. If you are an English native speaker, you may want to get subtitles for this one here. Without being too enthusiastic about it (maybe also because of the subject), I recommend checking it out all in all.

There is a real aesthetic and ethical layer to this movie that makes it fascinating and well worth the time and effort to watch. It is a film which shows a certain irony. The Nazis were going to show the real suffering in the Warsaw Ghetto. They were going to show the truth in what was happening in the Ghetto. That is why they filmed real scenes of suffering. However, they also filmed staged scenes in order to blame the suffering on the Jews themselves. The Nazis did not deny the suffering, they simply blamed the victims and hid the real cause - the Nazis themselves.The film gives us enough information for us to understand that it was the the Nazis who were directly responsible for the inhuman conditions we see in the film.This film shows us the essence of propaganda. It is the ruling class convincing itself that their victims deserve their suffering and are responsible for it.The film exposes both the real situation and false propaganda the Nazis intended to create to fool people into believing that they were innocent of their crimes.It is a brilliant, transcendental film that all people should see and consider.Some of the scenes are pretty horrific, for example, corpses being collected and thrown into mass graves, and I did turn my eyes away from the screen briefly. However, there is also an ironical humor in seeing how the Nazis sought to shift the blame, but only ended up providing evidence of their inhuman and shocking crimes. The amazing viciousness of the Nazis is matched by the amazing stupidity of this master race.I saw the film on Netflix. I believe it will be opening in two months in August in theaters around the country. See it on Netflix or in the theaters. It is time well spent. We owe it not to the dead, but to ourselves to see it and remember.

After the end of WWII, four reels of film were discovered inside a vault in the German mountains. The film had no titles or credits, and was simply labeled The Ghetto. The unfinished silent film was an attempt by the German propaganda machine to paint an idyllic picture of life within the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, where some 440,000 Polish Jews were crowded into a three-mile area while they awaited deportation. Carefully stage-managed scenes showed Jewish families living a life of luxury. This was contrasted with scenes showing poorer Jewish families living in absolute squalor, in overcrowded and filthy slums. Emaciated bodies lay on the streets. Dead bodies were bulldozed into mass graves. The point behind it all seems to have been to show that the Jews were heartless and willing to turn on their own in order to survive.In this fascinating documentary, former television editor Yael Hersonski exposes the lie behind the film, and exposes how film can be cynically manipulated for specific purposes to fool an audience. Hersonski shows the edited footage to a handful of survivors from the Ghetto and captures their heart breaking emotional reactions. Most shake their head in disbelief at the blatantly false representation of life in the ghettos.A Film Unfinished is a powerful and moving indictment of this Nazi propaganda and its cruel lie.