Best movie of this year hands down!

Sadly Over-hyped

Memorable, crazy movie

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

"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!

The fact that the Nazi/Third Reich regime, in conjunction with its rise to power in the 1930's Germany, instilled a massive propaganda machine to inflate the popularity and perpetuate the alleged good of its policies is nothing new, but the far-reaching abilities of such a machine are still being studied today. We're told in the opening minutes of Yael Hersonski's documentary A Film Unfinished that a concrete vault was discovered to have housed over 1,000 reels of propaganda footage. This particular documentary chooses to focus on one mysterious and overlooked piece known only by the name on the tape of its reel: "The Ghetto." The piece is an hour-long showcase of life in Warsaw, the largest Jewish ghetto in occupied Poland at the time. It was a cramped, walled-in location that spanned less than three square miles of territory with serious food stability and housed many deported Jews from the Reich. It has no audio, the celluloid is heavily damaged and corroded, as most poorly stored celluloid from the time is, and the scenes in the film are heavily staged bits that showcase Jews enjoying life in the ghetto.Largely hidden in the film and only seeping through some seriously heart-wrenching moments are the realities of the Warsaw Ghetto: unforgivably dirty conditions, overcrowded streets and homes that would make a viewing of this documentary in an atrium feel claustrophobic, and the frail subjects, some barely supporting the clothes on their backs through what is basically thin flesh and weak bones. While "The Ghetto" isn't shown in its entirety in A Film Unfinished, Hersonski and company look to add context to the time period by way of narration from an appointed Warsaw judge during the time period, as well as people who actually lived and experienced the conditions in Warsaw.But perhaps the most interesting interviews and testimonies in the entire film come from a man named Willy Wist, one of "The Ghetto"'s camera operators. We're told that a German crew would frequently come into Warsaw and actively monopolize and stage certain areas in order to "portray" life in the ghetto the way they wanted to; it was unnatural and incredibly forced, as most propaganda of the time was. Wist gives his opinions decades later on being one of the cameraman for such a project, in the midst of profiling the horrors that went when the cameras were off before they were turned on to capture the events inside an isolated community of outcasts."The Ghetto" is greatly reminiscent of a 1945 short film by the name of Topaz, which was smuggled out of the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah during World War II. That film profiled the families and daily activities of Japanese people inside an internment camp, and, according to the film's director, was largely predicated upon false responses and facial expressions from those inside the camp who were said to be miserable and beaten by the poor conditions. The existence of a film like "The Ghetto" exposes three levels of sickness in the treatment of Jews during World War II: the first is the active isolation, condemnation, and genocide of an entire group of people, the second is the act of exploiting the unfathomable suffering of the very same group of people by way of fabricated documentation, and the third is the appalling manipulation of such footage, which spins undernourishment, disease, and horribly inhumane living conditions, into positive attributes of a lawless and unjustifiable prison.Townspeople throwing garbage outside of their windows is a normal occurrence in Warsaw, in addition to apathy due to pervasive hunger and lack of food of any kind. The coffin-sealing nail of complete and utter disgust for me, personally, was to see a mountain - about as large as one of those impenetrable and ever-present snow-mounds in the center of a strip mall parking lot - of feces and human waste. Such horrors of Warsaw are shown in grave detail, and as disgusting as it was to experience, much less witness, it serves a fitting analogy for the conditions and overall quality of life in Warsaw. A Film Unfinished, as a documentary, would've probably done better to spend about thirty minutes giving us background into the discovery of the film, in addition to interviews with Wist and those who suffered in Warsaw, before actually showing the entirety of "The Ghetto." There are films like Dark Blood and Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, previously lost or unfinished works that recognize that fact by way of narration and exposition before actually giving us the promised product. The fact that Hersonski and company elaborate so much on "The Ghetto" in the first twenty minutes, but only proceed to show us maybe thirty to forty minutes of the project coupled with either narration or interjected interviews to distract from the events of the film, is pretty disappointing.A Film Unfinished does a nice job at attempting to be an all-encompassing piece devoted to profiling and really detailing the motivations behind this curious oddity of a contemptible time period in world history. I find it incredibly interesting that, even eight decades later, more information about World War II than ever, such as the art and sculptures the Nazis robbed from Jewish museums, the propaganda machine, and the living conditions in both internment camps and Germany itself, is trickling out to the public. A Film Unfinished is a necessary, if bleak, look into how sick - but pervasive and vital - Third Reich cinema was during the time, much less the actions of the Nazis themselves.Directed by: Yael Hersonski.

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.

When you watch this film, you will be told multiple times that the purpose of the film is unknown. Yet, when you listen to the description of how the film was made, and consider that propaganda was the intent of the film, I think that the purpose is understandable. Imagine that the film portrays not a controlled situation, rather an isolated situation; for, the Nazi presentation of the film would not have portrayed the situation as having been staged or controlled, rather the Nazi presentation would have purported to merely show Jews living in isolation from the outside world. The Nazi presentation would pretend to show how Jews interacted socially and economically when living together and establishing their own system of order. The Nazi presentation would pretend to show that the Jews were obviously unwilling to let go of one organizing principle no matter how bad things got, that organizing principle is capitalism. Remember, Nazi is National Socialism. And, Hitler had his own brand of "social justice", to wit, to return to Germans that which had been taken from them by the allegedly reprobate capitalist Jews. Now, imagine this film as a vehicle for advancing Hilter's brand of social justice and national socialism. As a Nazi, one could view this film footage and be permitted to feel satisfaction that the Jews were beyond redemption and meriting extinction in their inherent callous capitalist ways. Such is the original raw film's two fisted Nazi attack on both capitalism and the Jews. Think about it.