“Again and again in A Film Unfinished, faces turn to the camera. Most 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 cheeks caved in, their skin stretched tight, and their eyes unavoidable. Like so many faces that look back in so many documentaries, these indicate the subjects’ awareness of their status as such. Their expressions are curious, They are also silent, like all of “Das Ghetto,” an unfinished Nazi propaganda film discovered in an East German vault during the 1950s. Yael Hersonski has reassembled much of that footage for her film—some of it observational and some staged by the German film crew—along with readings from diaries and transcripts, as well as shots of ghetto survivors watching that footage. Comprised of more faces, shadowed in a theater, these shots serve as vivid reflections of your own experience, horrified at what they see. What they see exemplifies one of the most chilling aspects of the Third Reich, “an empire infatuated with the camera,” narrates Rona Kenan, “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, as German soldiers grab residents’ arms or push them along in the street, as starving children sit on curbs and adults hurry along sidewalks. “The intention of the propagandists can never be determined, only surmised,” says Kenan. No matter their motives, “Das Ghetto” has been used as “a trustworthy document for any filmmaker or museum seeking to show what really happened, to tell the untellable. The cinematic deception was forgotten and the black and white images were engraved in memory as historical truth.”

A Film Unfinished picks at this idea of “historical truth” as if it’s a scab. The resulting discomfort is 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. For Hersonski’s film insists on the constructedness of all films, fiction and documentary, hers as well as the Nazis’. This complicates their truth, makes it a process of recollection and interpretation at all stages, from shooting to assembling to consuming. “Do you see the garbage?” asks one survivor as she looks at a huge mass of waste. “People threw their garbage out the windows,” she explains, “because they were too weak to go down the stairs.” Her story reshapes the image as you watch, for it has just been described in another way, by one of the Nazis’ cameramen, Willy Wist. He says he was told “to film a large pile of feces in the courtyard of one of the buildings. I remember thinking to myself that either because of the winter or because of the overcrowding, the sanitary installations had stopped working.” Even as he speaks, his memory has turned in on itself, for he also recalls that he was shooting in May, not winter.”