Ceticultsot Beautiful, moving film.

Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de) "Shtikat Haarchion" or "Geheimsache Ghettofilm" or "A Film Unfinished" is a co-production between Germany and Israel from 2010 that resulted in this 85-minute documentary. Writer and director is Yael Hersonski and this is possibly his most known work. One reason for this may be that films about the years of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust usually attract enough viewers to keep a film from staying entirely unknown, even if you do not really deliver anything new to the subject. Of course, it's also not easy to do the latter as so many documentaries about this already exist. But luckily this one here does bring something new to the table, namely interesting information about a German propaganda film. That one was supposed to be made at the Warsaw ghetto and depict Jews as people living in the ghetto in order to convince Germans and audiences that even in the ghettos life isn't bad at all for them and maybe increase hate towards Jews even further. I am not entirely sure if this propaganda movie got made or still exists today (in fragments?), but thanks to this documentary we find out a bit about the backgrounds and circumstances of the production. I still believe it is really difficult to make a 90-minute film about a film of under an hour, so there were moments when I felt they could have been left out of this documentary piece. Anyway, it is still a good watch overall, mostly thanks to all the old footage that leaves a lasting impression and there are still some touching moments at times, even if I felt the film did not manage to make the emotional impact it tried to make, at least on me. Nonetheless, I am not surprised by all the awards recognition it received, also in the United States, even if it did not get nominated for an Oscar. I think it deserved awards recognition, but it was maybe a bit too much. If you are an English native speaker, you may want to get subtitles for this one here. Without being too enthusiastic about it (maybe also because of the subject), I recommend checking it out all in all.

kicklighterjam 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.

classicsoncall A single film cannister simply labeled 'The Ghetto', found many years following the end of World War II, sheds light on the Nazi propaganda machine and it's attempt to manipulate public opinion by revealing how 'wealthy' Jews seemingly lived alongside those of lesser means without regard for their squalid conditions. I was fascinated by the frequent use of the term 'rich' Jews, as today, the clothes they wore and the parties they attended under staged conditions resembled what would be considered moderately middle class. In actuality, I couldn't relate to terms like 'luxury' and 'paradise' as portrayed in the documentary, although one might consider that luxury would have described any possibility of escaping the torment and misery depicted here.If one's only perception of living conditions for the mass of Jewish humanity under the Nazi regime is pictures like "Schindler's List", then this footage offers the real deal. It's impossible to imagine hundreds of thousands of people cramped into a three square mile area of a ravaged city, starving and malnourished, tossing garbage out the windows of their tenements because they're too weak to dispose of it properly. Gaunt, expressionless children rummaging through piles of garbage looking for a useful bit of food scrap. The dead brought out to sidewalks and left to be rounded up in mass graves because they couldn't be buried properly. The conditions presented in this film are almost impossible to conceive in one's imagination, so horrid are the images that citizens of the Warsaw Ghetto had to endure as part of their daily life.Much of the film commentary is gleaned from the written documentation provided by Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Jewish council placed in charge of the Ghetto by the Nazi regime. There's also the recollections of cameraman Willy Wist who recorded much of the atrocity, one of the few such photographers who's name can be connected to the visual history of this era. By the end of his tenure, Czerniakow obviously concluded that his job in The Ghetto was that of a manager of a holding pen for Jewish natives and refugees on their way to a Nazi final solution, the Treblinka Death Camp. Two months after being ordered to draw up lists of Jews for relocation to Treblinka, he committed suicide with a cyanide capsule.As a historical document, this film is unscathing in it's portrayal of Nazi atrocity and the dehumanization of life on a grand scale. The reactions of now elderly survivors of the era who witnessed the conditions portrayed when they were children lends further testimony to how fortunate they were to finally escape. For historians and anyone interested in World War II, this is an unflinching look at how Man's inhumanity to Man can achieve indescribable proportions.

Howard Feuerwerker 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.