Review: A Film Unfinished (2010)

Today I watched A Film Unfinished, a 2010 documentary showing an unfinished propaganda film made by the Third Reich in the Warsaw Ghetto in May 1942, a few months before it was cleared. The original work is about an hour long, so the documentary runs about and hour and a half with the commentary. In addition to the film itself there are interviews with people who lived there at the time while they are watching the film as well as voiceover readings of court transcripts from one of the cameramen, journals from the Chairman of the Judenrat within the Ghetto, and letters from the SS officer in charge of the Ghetto.

The documentary is a look into one of the most fascinating areas of Third Reich for me - the propaganda machine that the Nazis created. Though the film lacks soundtrack or commentary in it's original form, other sources help narrate what we're seeing and provide context. The film oscillates between staged scenes of a luxurious life that some Jews apparently lived and the extreme poverty of others, focusing on the lack of sharing between the two. They also filmed staged aspects of Jewish religious life, including a life-threatening circumcision outside of a hospital.

One of the things the documentary does well is provide commentary on day-to-day life in the Ghetto, as well as the effect is had on those within it. When one of the women discusses how they became indifferent to the suffering of others, you can hear the pain it causes her to say such because she knows it's terrible, but she also knows that it was what she had to do to survive this. There are several stories that are similar and each one of them is paired with visuals from the original film that either prompted the story or illustrate it.

The documentary is a little slow and most of it is subtitled with the only English provided by the filmmaker. Many of the images are hard to watch, though if you have watched other films of this era, the images of starving people and corpses will feel familiar. But it's an interesting look at an incomplete project of the Third Reich. I probably won't watch it again, but I'm glad I watched it.

A Film Unfinished is currently available on Netflix online streaming.