San Diego Asian Film Festival: What We Left Unfinished (2019)
Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished (2010) brought to light footage that, for 50 years, was believed to have been an authentic historical record of Jewish life at the hands of the Nazis. A long-lost reel of outtakes was later unearthed, revealing retakes and cameramen staging shots. While much of what we see inside the Ghetto is documentary evidence, the fictionalized sequences bring to mind the dubious nature of filmed truth. Mariam Ghani’s What We Left Unfinished attempts to do the same for a quintet of uncompleted fictional films produced during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan between 1978-1991. The subject matter was substantial, the dramatization at times laughably substandard. How did anyone — even the most unenlightened moviegoer among us — believe for a second that any of this came close to representing the truth? If the goal of the government was to use film as an educational tool, well... the acting and staging call to mind an Encyclopedia Britannica action film produced by Cannon Films for classroom use. Fascinating though it may be from the standpoint of filmmaking, Ghani and her interview subjects play it straight, never really calling out the schlock inherent in the productions. — Scott Marks