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A Film Unfinished
Friday, July 23rd, 2010
The Film Forum presents: A film unfinished, directed by Yael Hersonski
Wednesday, August 18 – Tuesday, August 31 • Two Weeks
Showtimes: 1:00, 2:50, 4:40, 6:30, 8:20, 10:10
Tickets available online beginning August 11
“Gratifying in its ethical insistence that there are true things in the world, and that it is necessary for us to know them.”
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
“In hushed tones and with a steely sense-ordered methodology, A FILM UNFINISHED stands as a unique film-within-a-film, of significance for the historical value of the raw images, the memories they spur and internal evidence of how the Nazis staged scenes long assumed to be real.”
– Todd McCarthy, Variety
“Required viewing.” – Howard Feinstein, Screen Daily
“Harrowing. A historically invaluable doc.” – John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter
“Imagine a Nazi propaganda film so monstrous even a Nazi can’t stomach it.
That’s one possible and highly probable scenario suggested by Yael Hersonski’s remarkable Holocaust documentary.”
– Chris Chang, Film Comment
Since the end of WWII, one copy of a 60-minute (unfinished) propaganda film, shot by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto in May 1942, labeled simply “Ghetto,” sat undisturbed in an East German archive. A FILM UNFINISHED presents the entire film, carefully noting fictionalized sequences (e.g. dozens of Jewish patrons at an elegant restaurant; a luxurious funeral cortege). The film’s documentary footage is of an entirely different nature: corpses on sidewalks, beggars pacing the streets, children ravaged by hunger. The film includes a revealing interview with the only cinematographer identified with the production, as well as scenes in which now-elderly former residents of the Warsaw Ghetto review footage and occasionally recognize their neighbors. This is a film of enormous import: it documents some of the worst horrors of our time and the efforts (however imperfect) of the perpetrators to recast those events to suggest an entirely different scenario.
ISRAEL • 2010 • 89 MINS. • IN ENGLISH, HEBREW, GERMAN, POLISH & YIDDISH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES
OSCILLOSCOPE LABORATORIES
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