A Film Unfinished / Shtikat Haarchion, DE-IL 2009 colour, b&w 88 min.
dir:  Yael Hersonski pro|pro Itai Ken-Tor, Noemi Schory
sc:  Yael Hersonski
ed: Joel Alexis
cast: Alexander Beyer, Rüdiger Vogler
dis: Against Gravity

In May 1942, the Third Reich Propaganda Office’ film crew entered the Warsaw’s ghetto. Cinematographers worked for over a month. They filmed scenes of life on the streets, showed extreme poverty and the world of well-fed, they entered miserable backyards and refined restaurants, creating the world of contrasts and working on “capturing of the Jew character”. The recording was found shortly after the end of the war, in the Nazi’s film archives. For many years this “document” was believed to be the true image of life in the Warsaw ghetto.

Yael Hersonski, director, decided to investigate the circumstances in which the film was shot. She studied the 50-minutes long recording shot after shot, she went through archives, private notes describing the presence of the film crew in the ghetto, she even got the materials from the Willy Wist’s, German cinematographer, interrogations. Thorough analysis shows, that the document is a mystification prepared by Nazi’s propaganda, and the “normal” life was arranged from the beginning to the end. Hersonski’s film includes memories and commentaries of survivors, fragments of the infamous document, figures of German cinematographers and terrified glances of the ghetto inhabitants caught in frame. Nuances grasped by the author take this film to a universal level, they force into thinking about the nature and conditioning of any archive recording.

Sundance FF 2010 – World Cinema Documentary Film Editing Award