REVIEW: Three Minutes: A Lengthening [2022]

Rating: 7 out of 10.
  • Rating: PG | Runtime: 69 minutes
    Release Date: April 7th, 2022 (Netherlands) / August 19th, 2022 (USA)
    Studio: Neon / Super LTD
    Director(s): Bianca Stigter
    Writer(s): Bianca Stigter

Their trip to Poland was an extraordinary detour.


You never know what you’ll find in the attic collecting dust. Even so, thinking you might uncover film of a Polish city inhabited by a thousand people who would surely end up murdered a couple years later in the Holocaust is hardly amongst anyone’s first guesses. That’s exactly what Glenn Kurtz discovered, though. Squirreled away in his parents’ Florida closet was a reel of 16mm film his grandfather took in 1938 during a trip to Europe. And amongst the usual tourist destinations were a little more than three minutes of the small Polish town from where he hailed before immigrating to Brooklyn, NY at age five. It serves as one of the few documents left of a place, time, and people before the world seen was irrevocably altered.

Informed by Kurtz’s book Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film, filmmaker Bianca Stigter creates a seventy-minute extrapolation of that footage entitled Three Minutes: A Lengthening. The entirety of the feature is composed by those frames of Nasielsk taken by David Kurtz—sped up, slowed down, and zoomed in to absorb every inch and perhaps reveal answers as to who these men, women, and children were. From the trees lining the streets to a carved lion on the synagogue door, each object tells a story. And upon donating the film to the Holocaust Museum for restoration, each face supplies an opportunity for remembrance by those who survived the war. Eleven identities have since been confirmed, their lives suddenly reclaimed from the ether.

It’s a fascinating deep dive into the importance of archival home movies from moments in history marred by death and destruction. We see clothing, architecture, and personalities. We hear from Maurice Chandler—one of the boys seen on-screen—as he recounts what life was like in Nasielsk at that time and just how crazed everyone was to see Kurtz’s camera and ensure they were immortalized on its film. We see the town square discussed by others in horrific accounts about what happened just a short year later as the Nazis rounded up the resident Jews to ship off to concentration camps. We learn about the synagogue’s prior vandalism and the amazing tale of a young man saving his girlfriend from certain death by pretending he was a soldier.

Stigter recruits Helena Bonham Carter to narrate alongside the voices of Glenn Kurtz, Chandler, and others providing additional context to the town, the film, and the investigation into its truth that’s meticulously edited together. Over one hundred and fifty different faces were captured and cropped to hopefully be named in the future, their smiles forever preserved digitally so as not to be forgotten. And how could we when they are each shown to be brimming with life? The young man pushing a younger girl out of the way by the face. The little boy running towards the camera as a girl tries to reach out and grab him before straightening her pose. The woman angrily pushing her relatives through a doorway. A carefree nature soon to be erased.

Add the introspective notion that Kurtz’s aunt was the same age as these children, as Maurice, back in America and you begin to realize just how crucial the footage is. Because his family didn’t have to worry about the Nazis knocking on their door. They don’t have to look back at happy memories of their childhood and recall how it was replaced by nightmare. They get to look at it at all when so many of those on-screen here never could. And when you acknowledge that, you can begin to see how a personal curio can be transformed into a work of art. Much like the ancient vases discussed, this celluloid is mined as a reflection of humankind at its specific moment in history—a priceless artifact itself.


photography:
[1] Townspeople of the predominantly Jewish village of Nasielsk, Poland in 1938 as seen in Bianca Stigter’s Three Minutes – A Lengthening. Image courtesy of Family Affair Films, © US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
[2] Children living in the predominantly Jewish village of Nasielsk, Poland in 1938 as seen in Bianca Stigter’s Three Minutes – A Lengthening. Image courtesy of Family Affair Films, © US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
[3] Townspeople of the predominantly Jewish village of Nasielsk, Poland in 1938 as seen in Bianca Stigter’s Three Minutes – A Lengthening. Image courtesy of Family Affair Films, © US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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