In 1942 the Nazis dispatched a film crew to the hellishly overcrowded Warsaw ghetto to make a propaganda film. It was never completed, but several half-edited reels of silent footage were recovered from an underground archive after the war, and for better or worse they represent our best visual document of this anteroom to the death camps. Filmmaker Yael Hersonski reshapes the impossibly vile and tragic source material into a devastating record of Nazi criminality, interrogating every untrustworthy frame by testing it against the memories of survivors, the diaries of the man who headed the ghetto’s Jewish council, and a transcript of chilling testimony from one of the German cinematographers. In subtitled German, Hebrew, Polish, and Yiddish.
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