Synopsis
Yael Hersonski's powerful documentary achieves a remarkable feat through its penetrating look at another film-the now-infamous Nazi-produced film about the Warsaw Ghetto. Discovered after the war, the unfinished work, with no soundtrack, quickly became a resource for historians seeking an authentic record, despite its elaborate propagandistic construction. The later discovery of a long-missing reel complicated earlier readings, showing the manipulations of camera crews in these "everyday" scenes. Well-heeled Jews attending elegant dinners and theatricals (while callously stepping over the dead bodies of compatriots) now appeared as unwilling, but complicit, actors, alternately fearful and in denial of their looming fate.
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Cast
- Alexander BeyerInterrogator
- Rüdiger VoglerWilly Wist
Recommendations
- 100
Entertainment Weekly
Hersonski quietly and insistently unravels reality from "reality"; her commitment to archival authenticity is its own tribute to those no longer able to testify. - 90
New York Magazine (Vulture)
It becomes a meditation on the dual nature of film, on a "reality" at once true and false, essential and tainted. - 90
Variety
It stands as a unique film-within-a-film, of significance for the historical value of the raw images, the memories they spur and internal evidence of how the Nazis staged scenes long assumed to be real. - 90
Village Voice
The artificial look of the added footage, counterpointed by the commentary of inmates and survivors, only underscores the unending shock of the film's unadulterated images, even though we have seen them in other Shoah documentaries. - 90
The New York Times
Remarkable as much for its speculative restraint as for its philosophical reach. - 90
Salon
The first Holocaust movie that's actually about another Holocaust movie, and in some peculiar way it brings us closer to the terror and tragedy of the original event. - 88
New York Post
Extremely unsettling and thought- provoking. - 80
The Hollywood Reporter
Hersonski enriches this evidence by bringing in survivors of the ghetto, who tell stories of life there while watching the film themselves.
