Sixty-nine years ago, Nazi propagandists began work on Das Ghetto—a movie that was to depict the Warsaw Ghetto as a sort of latter-day Garden of Gethsemane. The film was never finished, but the footage that was shot survived. (A lost reel was discovered in 1998.) A Film Unfinished puts the footage in context, going some way, at least, toward explaining the unexplainable.
First-time director Yael Hersonski interviews five survivors of the ghetto and, remarkably, one of the original cameramen. She also takes a scalpel to the 60 minutes of found footage. The resulting documentary—which premiered at Sundance last year, airs on PBS’s Independent Lens tomorrow night, and comes to DVD next week—is absolutely riveting.
 to a friend
|
the trailer for A Film Unfinished
the film’s website
the DVD
the VeryShortList.com archive