Goebbels seized on radio and other media for propaganda even before FDR’s fireside chats. The Reich, like the British, mouthed resettlement in Madagascar, but instead bamboozled International and Danish Red Cross observers with Jewish happy campers at “model” Arbeit Macht Frei Theresienstadt and made a later film there, and sent camera crews to Warsaw to make Das Ghetto. Moreover, like Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, Berlin was obsessive about recording its activities. Both stands come together, propaganda alongside self-documentation, in A Film Unfinished, a first non-fiction feature from Israeli television editor Yael Hersonski.

Valuable as history of life (and death) in Eastern Europe’s most populous “holding pen” before shipment to Final Solution centers at Treblinka and elsewhere, the film also questions “documentation” per se, that is, how much of what people are allowed to see and hear is, even if perceived, verifiable “truth.” Less than two weeks before release, Oscilloscope is still appealing the “R” rating which will prevent educational classroom use.

The finished product consists of present-day facial and vocal color reactions of five Israeli octogenarian Ghetto survivors at private screenings; of a color re-enactment of taped interviews with Specialist Willy Wist, the single later identified (but unlocated) German cameraman; unnecessary color filler to give a sense of “film-ness”; and, stained but decipherable b&w from May 1942.

The spinal cord here was known to specialists, sixty-two celluloid minutes that weathered chaos, Nazi destruction of its own evil tracks, and Soviet appropriation, plus seven-and-a-half minutes of “visually inverted” 35 mm handed over by a Polish man. Then, over half a century after Nuremberg, in the film cellar of a U.S. base a researcher uncovered two more reels, thirty minutes of multiple outtakes which in a couple instances caught German photographers inadvertently passing before the camera.

The other identified figure is Adam Czerniaków, tragic chairman of the overcrowded, undersupplied walled-in district’s puppet Judenrat, or Jewish Council. Soon to take his own life with cyanide, this helpless figurehead is forced to cooperate in the propaganda agenda but supplies personal commentary here through the voiced-over diary entries also prominent in Shoah.

The historical footage is at once fascinating and repellent. Initially it seems to portray crowded yet relatively normal street activity, but, as it goes forward, the record is increasingly of garbage, shortage and starvation, as hollow faces betray defeated resigned bewilderment. Amidst rumors of deportation that clash with baseless hope, disease and deprivation killed thousands, while as in medieval plague times bodies line sidewalks to be carted (or not) for sliding into mass gravesites.

For reasons not satisfactorily clarified, the photographers had instructions to film contrasts between abject poverty and (relative) comfort. When the two missing reels turned up in 1998, their three or four or more takes gave indication of the propaganda purposes to be served. Rounded up and coached, passersby were to turn up their noses at dead and dying coreligionists, thus illustrating Jewish selfishness. Orchestrated by a man code-named “Goldpheasant,” elegant dinner parties and restaurant meals were staged to evidence a standard of living that would belie accusations, or abused “patrons” sardined into the New Azazel Theater had to laugh at and applaud suffering actors. A dangling puzzle is one sequence in which Jewish men are made to strip in a basement, juxtaposed with women chosen for being meatier than most skin-and-bones residents and unhappily entering a mikveh or ritual immersion bath.

Intercut are the faces of the survivor-viewers, youngsters back then, searching for a chance relative or friend or “my mother walking” in the market or along Leszno or Smozna Street: there’s “Rubinstein! for heaven sake!” Understandably not verbose, they contrast with Sonderführer Wist, a scrap-metal-man afterwards, whose calm voice denies all.

“To me,” declared Elie Wiesel, “indifference is the epitome of evil.” Of that never-forget-so-that-never-again school, A Film Unfinished cannot be, is not intended to be, entertainment. Survivors talk of the suppression of feeling necessary to live through the unthinkable, whereas revisiting it now “I am no longer immune. I am so happy I can cry and that I am again human.” Historical rather than cinematic, such documents have a hard go of it to re-sensitize a world bombarded with recorded and/or recreated carnage, real and fictionalized.

(Released by Oscilloscope Laboratories and rated “R” on appeal for disturbing images of Holocaust atrocities, including graphic nudity.)