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Most faces in Yael Hersonski’s film belong to residents of the Warsaw ghetto, looking back at the Nazis filming them in May 1942. Preserved in a 62-minute project titled “Das Ghetto”, today they’re both haunted and haunting, their skin stretched tight and their eyes unavoidable. The Third Reich, narrates Israeli musician Rona Kenan, was “an empire infatuated with the camera, that knew so well to document its own evil, passionately, systematically, like no other nation before it.” This infatuation is visible everywhere in A Film Unfinished, which sorts through memories, traumas, and images without clear contexts, to produce a discomfort more resonant than that of “disturbing images of Holocaust atrocities including graphic nudity” that led the MPAA to give the documentary an unusual R rating.
The film screens 24 Thursday at the IFC Center, as part of Stranger Than Fiction‘s Winter Series, followed by a Q&A with guest Isaac Zablocki. See PopMatters’ review.
