“A Film Unfinished,” the award-winning Holocaust documentary, has lost its appeal to get the Motion Picture Association of America to revise its "R" rating.
The MPAA's appeals board, a group of representatives from film studios and exhibition companies, on Thursday voted 12 to 3 to uphold the initial rating after an appeal from the film’s director, Yael Hersonski, and from Oscilloscope Laboratories, which will release it on Aug.18 in New York and Aug. 20 in Los Angeles.
"In a world where young people are bombarded with meaningless entertainment, it's unfortunate that a film with real educational and historic value would be denied to them by an organization that is supposed to be working to help them,” said Oscilloscope co-founder Adam Yauch in a statement.
The film is centered around footage shot by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, and later found to have been staged for propaganda purposes. It contains images of corpses lying on the street, and two scenes of full frontal male and female nudity that were staged in a public bath.
In its rating, the MPAA stated that the "R" was given for "disturbing images of Holocaust atrocities including graphic nudity."
The appeal, Oscilloscope co-founder David Fenkel told TheWrap, was based largely on community standards for viewing images from the Holocaust.
“This is all about community standards for non-fiction material, and the context in which the footage is shown,” he said. “The federall -funded Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., has images that are much worse than what’s in this film, and they have a sign saying, ‘Not recommended for anyone under 11.’
“They’ve had 30 million people visiting, and more than 8 million students, and you know how many letters of complaint they’ve gotten? Seven.”
The key issue, he said, is that the "R" rating will hurt the film’s chances of being shown in schools or purchased by libraries.
“A lot of schools wouldn’t show it, because they have a rule against the 'R' rating,” he said. “And it’d be much harder to get into libraries. This film is going to be used for educational purposes, and an 'R' rating would completely limit that.”
A the hearing, Hersonski presented a letter from a Holocaust survivor who is interviewed in the film.
Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, also released a statement in support of the film's importance as a teaching tool.
“I understand that this is a difficult film to watch,” Hersonski, whose grandmother is a Holocaust survivor and onetime resident of the Warsaw Ghetto, told theWrap before the appeal took place. “But I think the crucial thing is to allow schools to decide whether they want to show it or not, not to prevent people from the ability to decide.”
The filmmakers had one precedent on their side: In 2004, the Iraq-set documentary “Gunner Palace” was originally rated "R" for the language used by American troops.
