A Film Unfinished

     The film “A Film Unfinished,” is about the life of Jewish people that were living in the Warsaw Ghetto in the 1940s. The film had no sound to it but they added commentaries during the movie made by some of the survivors of the Warsaw ghetto. During the film they also interviewed one of the cameramen that filmed this movie.

     The people were filming in the ghetto as a form of propaganda. They were trying to prove that life in the ghetto for Jews was not bad. Most of the scenes were staged by actors. They tried showing Jews living luxurious lives in the ghetto even though that's far from the truth. Walking around in the ghetto there were many corpses lying around on the sidewalks and the streets. The filmmakers asked Jewish people to walk passed the corpses without even glancing at them so that they could make Jewish people look heartless. They even filmed inside some of the rooms in the ghetto. They depicted the rooms as spacious and comfortable although that was far from reality because sometimes there would be multiple families living in a room at once. They also put flowers inside the room and one of the survivors that commented on the film said that nobody had flowers because the flowers would have been eaten.

    I found the film to be very interesting and educating. I had seen pictures before of the ghettos and I thought I had a pretty good understanding of what it looked like but to actually see it on film changed a lot of my perceptions on it. To get to see the Jews walking around on the street, being pushed out of their houses and kids starving to death on the sidewalk just broke my heart. Another part that broke my heart was when the survivors were watching the bodies being piled in the mass grave. Most could not look that the bodies. One survivor said, “I am no longer immune. I cry today.”