A Film Unfinished

Silence sometimes speaks louder than words in this graphic peer inside the Warsaw Ghetto of May 1942, where a half million Jews were corralled by the Nazis in a 3-square-mile urban patch of limbo, desperate hope, squalor and death just months before mass deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp. The core of writer-director Yael Hersonski’s film within a film is the silent raw footage of a Third Reich propaganda project that was used by historians out of context until its staged scenes contrasting the luxury and squalor of supposed daily ghetto life were uncovered in a archival warehouse. Hersonski supplements this find with current testimonials from ghetto survivors; comments from a cameraman who shot the initial project; and readings from diaries, official reports and war-crime trials transcripts. The result is a devastating account of the evil of which mankind is capable, the power of imagery as a tool and weapon, the distortion of history and the aching indifference to the suffering of others that was needed for self-preservation.