Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Having watched this film several times it still haunts me. Knowing that behind the smiling faces that you see in the film, that pure horror propells them.Seeing the piles upon piles of dead bodies and the pure evil that was done, haunting can not even come close to what i was watching.I do not believe that this film should be viewed by those younger than 18. If it has had the effect on me at age 60, i do not think it wise for them to see. It is vital for this film to be seen by older persons who can some how manage to sit through it. If by the end you are not bothered by it, then there is something very wrong with your humanity.It is so true that Man is more savage and inhuman than an animal.

By the time Adolf Hitler (b. 1889) had written Mein Kampf (My Struggle) he had already surmised that at least half of Germany's problems during World War 1 were due to the lack of vision and skill to use and project propaganda, to give it its political tag, enlightenment. This, the method of control of the mind, body and soul to enhance its people to complete dominance, oppression and obedience of the Will through fear, hatred, paranoia, to the point of xenophobia. Hitler had learned his lesson with extreme interest and with the onslaught of his uprising to the days of his decline he had used the medium of the moment; film.Dr. (Paul) Joseph Goebbels (b. 1897), Hitler's appointed minister for Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, had total control over all mediums, and film and cinema were to be his greatest ally. (Worthy of note here is the David Welch book "Propaganda and the German Cinema; 1933-1945" that delves into the mind and machine that is both Goebbels and his highly controlled medium which analyses major German propaganda film and documentaries of that era). Here, with reel one, with A Film Unfinished, we see the birth of an idea that bears fruition but is never completed; the title of this film, within this documentary that is being examined is, simply, called The Ghetto. With no dialogue, no sound but simply a moment caught in time, it is, on first viewing, an account of life within the Ghetto of Warsaw: good, bad or indifferent. It is with this in mind that we are given an account of several interwoven worlds; we are shown the rich, the poor, the destitute and those with, seemingly, influence all congesting in one tiny mass of land, three square miles, committing to weddings, parties, funerals, a circumcision and life, all 400,000. What A Film Unfinished tries to dispel here is the fact that with the finding of a second reel, later, the whole process before now looks very much tainted and dubious, Ms. Yael Hersonski has uncovered a conspiracy of fear and total obedience within the Warsaw Ghetto, conducted by the Nazi propaganda machine. Breaking the myth that what we have witnessed beforehand has been nothing more than a fabricated, constructed and manipulated tool to express how the Nazi regime and in particular, the Jewish community here, were living life happily, freely and independently. This valid point of photo manipulation begs the question "What can we believe?", if this second reel had never been found would we still, with extreme caution perhaps, take the whole scenario for granted? What Ms. Hersonski has done is to discharge the myth of life, not so much as in the Ghetto, but the Nazis' point of view of life within its streets, with the account of first hand witnesses' and to have, too, an account from one of the Nazi camera crew. All making their point very well, an elaborate hoax. What cannot be covered up with lies here is the squalor, deprivation and hunger that conflicts with the affluent rich that coincide with this open prison, this, just may have been the image that the Nazi propaganda machine wanted to project, a polar opposite of a community living side-by-side. To steer both resentment and disgust for these people by portraying them as weak and at the same time a selfish race. The scene in which children caught with food under their clothing and forced to empty their pockets, seeing the food spill out onto the street, is both heartbreaking and at the same time untrustworthy, again, one has to be careful in judging what we see, as we have now become aware that not all we see is accountably factual. This is the power of the medium of film and this, too, ironically, is the power of Ms. Hersonski work here. Raising questions that need to be asked, has the documentary film ever been so poorly placed, so exposed to the point of questionable doubt. Can we truly believe in what we are seeing, even with today's medium playing its role in contemporary societies? There is only one possible simple answer, one possible simple solution, trust not in what you see on the screen but trust more in what one has to say, to hear and to experience. This is where the true documentary lies.

It just seems strange to me. This film was supposedly found at war's end, yet nobody ever heard of it until this mensch just happens to stumble across it somewhere and immediately recognizes that it's a propaganda film (he would know). Of course, now we can safely ignore all the photos and films of well-to-do Jews oblivious to the poverty of their neighbors- any time you see a Jew do anything heartless or callous or evil or negative in any way, it's obviously just staged propaganda made to make them look bad. How fortunate that this film was 'discovered', otherwise we would have to believe that us Jews are just like everyone else, that our merchants are as greedy as Gentile merchants, that our wealthy can be just as disconnected and heartless as any other religion's wealthy. If not for this film, we might think that Jews are somehow less than perfect and actually capable of fault!And to answer this nonsense:"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."Nazi Germany was not socialist, it was fascist. Fascism is state capitalism. At least they didn't forbid American capitalists from selling them weapons throughout the entire war. Google Bush trading with the enemy. Capitalists put profits above EVERYTHING- whether they happen to be Jewish or not makes no difference.

After the end of WWII, four reels of film were discovered inside a vault in the German mountains. The film had no titles or credits, and was simply labeled The Ghetto. The unfinished silent film was an attempt by the German propaganda machine to paint an idyllic picture of life within the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, where some 440,000 Polish Jews were crowded into a three-mile area while they awaited deportation. Carefully stage-managed scenes showed Jewish families living a life of luxury. This was contrasted with scenes showing poorer Jewish families living in absolute squalor, in overcrowded and filthy slums. Emaciated bodies lay on the streets. Dead bodies were bulldozed into mass graves. The point behind it all seems to have been to show that the Jews were heartless and willing to turn on their own in order to survive.In this fascinating documentary, former television editor Yael Hersonski exposes the lie behind the film, and exposes how film can be cynically manipulated for specific purposes to fool an audience. Hersonski shows the edited footage to a handful of survivors from the Ghetto and captures their heart breaking emotional reactions. Most shake their head in disbelief at the blatantly false representation of life in the ghettos.A Film Unfinished is a powerful and moving indictment of this Nazi propaganda and its cruel lie.