An act of scholarship: re-examining a can of unedited Nazi-propaganda footage, some of it patently staged, of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, an hour’s worth of ghostly images of people long gone, seemingly emphasizing the contrasts of poverty and luxury, but overall of mysterious purpose. (It is, more than anything else, a self-indictment of the Nazis for living conditions they themselves created.) Filmmaker Yael Hersonski extracts passages from the diaries of the Jewish liaison to the Nazis, solicits commentary from present-day survivors (“Where did we ever see a flower? We would have eaten the flower”), and stages re-enactments of sworn testimony from one of the original cameramen (impersonated by the well-known Rudiger Vogler). It is all very interesting and valuable, but like other Holocaust films, requires a certain boundlessness of appetite and a certain strength of stomach. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd
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