An electrifying essay on film's ability to falsify history.
- Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune, March 03, 2011
Filmmaker Yael Hersonski reshapes the impossibly vile and tragic source material into a devastating record of Nazi criminality.
- Cliff Doerksen, Chicago Reader, January 04, 2011
Yael Hersonski's documentary is infuriating, heartbreaking, devastating -- and scary. It depicts a lie upon a lie.
- Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic, December 02, 2010
A remarkable new documentary that reminds us of film's inherent capacity for lying.
- Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News, November 04, 2010
A Film Unfinished is a profoundly unnerving historical document.
- Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer, October 14, 2010
What we are left with is perhaps one of the most disturbing 60 minutes of raw footage ever put together.
- Leba Hertz, San Francisco Chronicle, September 30, 2010
The result is a harrowing, unsettling journey -- a terribly moving document.
- Stephen Cole, Globe and Mail, September 24, 2010
A Film Unfinished may not be the strangest making-of documentary you've ever seen. It may, however, be the most affecting.
- Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post, September 24, 2010
Hersonski not only dispels the big lie at the center of the Nazi footage but she ingeniously separates and identifies the many smaller lies and where they entwined with facts.
- Ty Burr, Boston Globe, September 23, 2010
It is a privileged experience to watch A Film Unfinished. There is no other historical document like it but, of course, its lasting value is as a human document.
- Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor, September 10, 2010
There is only about an hour of it, but around it filmmaker Yael Hersonski has built a striking feature.
- Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger, August 19, 2010
Extremely unsettling and thought- provoking.
- Lou Lumenick, New York Post, August 19, 2010
Moving, mysterious and intellectually provocative, A Film Unfinished positions familiar Holocaust horrors (the R rating was unsuccessfully contested) within a philosophical commentary on the way we view images.
- Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times, August 18, 2010
The artificial look of the added footage, counterpointed by the commentary of inmates and survivors, only underscores the unending shock of the film's unadulterated images, even though we have seen them in other Shoah documentaries.
- Ella Taylor, Village Voice, August 17, 2010
It becomes a meditation on the dual nature of film, on a "reality" at once true and false, essential and tainted.
- David Edelstein, New York Magazine, August 16, 2010
A Film Unfinished reminds you that the nightmare of the Holocaust knows no limits.
- Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald, November 04, 2010
Discovered after the war, the film contains horrific images of starvation, poverty and humiliation, interspersed with surreal scenes of well-dressed Jews enjoying a restaurant dinner or an urban stroll.
- Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times, October 14, 2010
It will test your faith in humanity, but Hersonski's film is nonetheless a brilliant reminder of the importance of bearing witness.
- Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York, August 18, 2010
A Film Unfinished is affecting as a rare document of a terrible place and time, and those who lived there.
- Noel Murray, AV Club, August 19, 2010
Yael Hersonski is no less a shrewd manipulator than the German directors she set out to expose.
- Andrew Schenker, Slant Magazine, August 15, 2010
