Q: Well, did she ever tell you about her experience?
YH: No, she was among the group that chose to remain in silence.
Q: How were these “actors” for the film chosen by the Nazis?
YH: They did whatever they were told to do by the soldiers. But people were chosen who had more flesh on their bones. They were the better-off minority who had been brought there from Warsaw, in contrast to the refugees from other parts of the Third Reich, who are seen dying of hunger in the streets.
Q: Is there any special meaning to your choice for the title, A Film Unfinished?
YH: It’s my way of thinking about the past, not as something which has a beginning and an end, but which is continuous. And still in a way, passing.
Q: Why were the Nazis interested in filming those religious rituals in the documentary, like the baths and circumcisions?
YH: I think they wanted to portray a typical Jew as leading an esoteric life, and to also show contrasts between rich and poor and create a feeling of repulsion, for educational purposes. That is, to film it in a way to make people feel disgusted by what they see. Even I had difficulty watching these fabricated images.
Q: How would you say your film grapples with the notion of history as written by the victors and subverts the notion of history written by the victors? And mass manipulation, not only of the victims and that contemporary generation, but also future generations?
YH: That’s why I wanted to make this film. We’ve been flooded with so many images of the Holocaust that we can no longer attach ourselves emotionally and I wanted to bring that layered content back to life.
Q: When you make a documentary like this, as a conscious act of historical memory and following so many other Holocaust films, and you see that little has changed or any lessons learned from those films, how do you feel about that?
YH: I don’t know how to translate into actions our understanding of what is going on; I don’t know how one does it. I just know that something happened back then, and we are in a situation today where we are so massively bombarded by images of atrocities that it’s very, very hard to emotionally digest what we see. People get numb and it makes our ethical status as viewers even worse. I mean, even after we become more aware of what we’re seeing, it doesn’t mean that we’re going to leave our living rooms and do something about it. But I think it’s at least a stage that I was seeking to enable the viewer to reach, in order to decide for himself. That’s how I get to see things, as an Israeli citizen. But the emotional content is all there within the historical data, we just have to know how to look for it and read it. And there is nothing like the cinematic image which can bring that into our living rooms. But there are people who can later manipulate the message. So we have to be aware how limited we are as viewers, and how much more there is in our journey towards knowing more.
Q: Then what would you like people to learn and understand with your film?
YH: I wish viewers to see this film and to understand that they are being manipulated as viewers. But it doesn’t mean that they can’t seek something which is much more truthful. When you do that, you realize that you at least became closer and that you didn’t let your own understanding of what is going on around you, be decided for you about how to think.