Three Minutes: A Lengthening (2021)

Directed by: Bianca Stigter | 69 minutes | documentary | Starring: Helena Bonham Carter

Historian and cultural critic Bianca Stigter has created a particularly rich and striking film essay in memory of the Jewish community from the Polish town of Nasielsk with ‘Three Minutes: A Lengthening’. This essay is based on a three-minute amateur film by David Kurtz, a striking American businessman who also explored his family roots during a summer-long European trip. Thus Kurtz ended up in Nasielsk in 1938, not long before disaster poured out on the town’s Jewish community.

Both in content and form, every minute counts in the barely seventy-minute long ‘Three Minutes: A Lengthening’. With minor variations, the visual essay repeats Kurtz’s restored film. The essay is not just about the amateur film, it is the DNA of Stigter’s film. While searching, not a single glance escapes the director, the painstaking work splashes off the canvas. This may sound (visually) boring, but it is anything but, especially if you consider the result of all the detective work: it tries to keep people, mostly Holocaust victims, alive for the memory. In addition, you learn to watch something that may look like the umpteenth Omroep Max holiday film from a historical perspective.

The lifeblood, and also the horror, of ‘Three Minutes: A Lengthening’ is in the countless anecdotes that are unleashed with those still alive, including the very elderly Maurice Chandler. By chance, a family member drew the attention of Chandler, who had emigrated to America, to Kurtz’s travel film that has since become available on the internet. In the voice-over, Chandler eagerly talks about how he was part of the young mob that tried to come into the picture, but the American businessman preferred to focus his new toy on the picturesque surroundings than on the colorful inhabitants. Chandler, a teenager at the time, hardly recognizes any woman who crossed the eye of the camera. After all, because of his strict faith, he was not allowed to look at women. Then it was just that, he sighs. Nevertheless, he experienced it as a carefree time, life was orderly and ‘everyone’ worked at the large button factory that was renowned far in Germany. No one, Chandler said, knew what awaited them. With trembling knees, Stigter and Glenn Kurtz look beyond the innocence of the travel film. These testimonials still hit like a bomb.

‘Three Minutes: A Lengthening’ shows a deep longing for the power of remembering. It tries to save something from what is no longer there, something that mainly still wanders in fragments of images. Only a few hundred of a few thousand Jewish people from Nasielsk survived the Holocaust. Kurtz’s video features about 150 faces from that community, of which his grandson and writer Glenn has so far been able to identify 11 people with vital help. Voices like Chandler’s represent the only living connection to the immensely sad history behind these three minutes. Listening to Stigter’s film essay therefore strengthens hope in the power of testimony for later generations.