Film

A New Look at the Warsaw Ghetto

Documentary picks apart Nazi propaganda.

In May 1942, the Nazis began a 30-day film shoot about the lives of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, just months before deportations would begin to death camps. That footage was sometimes used as a document of ghetto life, until 1998, when more footage was discovered showing just how far the Nazis went to stage the scenes—outtakes of scenes of well-dressed Jews ignoring suffering children and corpses. In a new film, A Film Unfinished, Israeli filmmaker Yael Hersonski critically dissects the Nazi films, interviewing survivors and even a cameraman who helped shoot the original footage. The New York Times calls the film “moving, mysterious and intellectually provocative,” and draws attention to a scene in which five ghetto survivors watch the Nazi footage. Watching the propaganda, one survivor says, “My mother wore her beautiful coat, and sometimes a hat. So what?”