Joëlle Alexis won the World Cinema Documentary prize for Editing Saturday night at Sundance for her work on Yael Hersonski's A FILM UNFINISHED. The movie examines an unfinished Nazi propaganda film about life in the Warsaw ghetto.
John DeFore reviewed the film for the Hollywood Reporter and calls the film "tough viewing":
"The eponymous film (which director Yael Hersonski says has never been presented in its entirety) is a work of propaganda shot in the Warsaw ghetto by SS cameramen. Lacking voiceover narration or titles, its exact intentions are unclear, but the film's juxtaposition of starving Jews with privileged ones seems intended to present the ghetto's inhabitants as an inhumane community deserving of extermination.
Combing through the journals of a ghetto social leader, the testimony of a Nazi cameraman, and newly discovered outtakes from the film, Hersonski reveals the extent to which these scenes were fabricated, with residents forced to put on a show to back up the official narrative.The found footage becomes more horrific as it progresses, and by the time we see skeletal men being forced to bathe beside well-fed women, many viewers will be desperate for the doc to end."
Holly Willis profiles the film for the Sundance website. Gabrielle Birkner interviews Hersonski for The Forward.
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