Three Minutes: A Lengthening

The three minutes (and 53 seconds) are a home movie of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk, a Polish village near the Ukrainian border, shot in 1938 by visiting American businessman, David Kurtz, who was making a tour of Europe with his wife and three friends. On Thurs 4th August, they visited the place his family had emigrated from and shot Kodachrome footage, some in black and white, some colour, of around 150 of its population. Less than a hundred of Nasielsk's 4,000 Jewish inhabitants would survive the Holocaust.

The Lengthening is the hour (just over) Stigter's film spends exploring the images, trying to identify the people, draw out meaning and recount their fates. The poignancy of this footage is a given, but you may wonder whether some of Stiger's strategies - running the film in reverse, isolating individual faces - really add much to our understanding. I would, very respectfully, take issue with the assertion that the Holocaust is what makes Kurtz's film poignant. Any footage of people from the past has a desperate sadness. Time is the defining factor and its passing is the obscenity that gives it meaning.

Originally Premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival in the Spotlight Selection.

"Three Minutes: A Lengthening" is about a snippet of 16mm film offers an emotionally charged, meditative glimpse into the lives of the unsuspecting Jewish citizens of a small Polish village at the precipice of World War II. Director Bianca Stigter uses an entire 16mm film to offer a nostalgic experience about the topics of WWII and the Jewish people and it was an interesting take on researching and covering the topic from a cinematic lens. The presentation is well presented with really good uses of archival footage used throughout the entire film. The footage helps to add a feel of the past, the old days and what it must have felt like during the WWII years.

Helena Boham Carter's narration does provide the information nicely and her voice fits the scenario pretty well. However, the documentary does feel like it's a bit stale since the entire film is using footages, which does get a bit old at the end of the film. The pacing really really does drag and because of that, it made some parts unsatisfying and not as engaging as I was hoping for. Certain sound designs were noticeable that had some poor structures and some editing could be improved. In my opinion, this would have worked as a short film rather then being a feature limit film.

Overall, It's interesting to see a documentary about the Jewish people's lives in Poland from old archival footages but I feel like it was a little underwhelming by the end of the day. But I still recommend for those who are interested.

Rating: B-

As "Three Minutes: A Lengthening" (2022 release; 69 min) opens, we immediately get the entire 3+ min. Footage that was filmed in 1938 in a small village north of Warsaw, Poland. The footage is law quality at times, and high quality at times, and goes back and forth between B&W and color. The voice over (by Helen Bonham Carter) informs us that the footage was discovered in 2009 in Florida, by the grandson of the guy who filmed it. But what are we actually seeing in those 3+ minutes?

Couple of comments: this is directed by Dutch film maker Bianca Stigter. Here she assesses what we actually see in this historic footage. Glenn Kurtz, grandson of David Kurtz who filmed this while on a tourist trip across Europe, is intrigued and wants to know more: where was this filmed? Who is being filmed? Etc. So this is not unlike putting together a puzzle, albeit hampered by a 70 years delay, during which most (but not all) of these people have perished and much (but not all) if the small village has been torn down and/or rebuilt. Like revealing an onion's layer after layer, more information is revealed to us. The film makers do an excellent job putting it all together in a way that combines history and mystery, paying tribute to the erstwhile population of a small Polish village whose Jewish population was decimated by the Holocaust.

I readily admit I had not heard of this film, that is until I read NPR's list of the "50 Best Movies and TV of 2022" earlier this week, and I immediately knew I just had to see this. The fact that it is currently rated 100% Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes certainly didn't hurt either. "Three Minutes: A Lengthening" is currently streaming on Hulu, where I caught it last night. If you have any interest in the Holocaust or Europe's pre-WWII era, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.

An important film with good narration which I learnt quite a lot from. The most powerful part for me was the section on the community being beaten and rounded up to be taken away during December 1939. The film is short, about an hour or so, it pulls as much as it possibly can from 3 minutes of archive footage. It lacks context or explanations though about why this was happening, what was the situation in Germany and Poland during the 1930s. It never matches the film Shoah in it's scope and filmmaking art, in fact there is something quite uncinematic about this, possibly to do with the fact it was made during various Covid lockdowns in different countries. It is quite informative though and deals with a very important subject matter.

Although this received excellent critical reviews and was only 69 minutes long, I wasn't sure how much I would like this one for two reasons. The first one was that the three prior reviews before me on IMDb were not very positive. The second reason is that over the years, Holocaust movies no longer break any new ground, and I find them to be mostly derivative. If you see my IMDb review for "Final Account," you will see that most people don't like that I didn't fall all over myself saying how great that documentary is. That's because I've seen that kind of Holocaust film (documentary or dramatic movie) so many times that I don't learn anything new, and it's an absolute bore.

So why did I l like "Three Minutes: A Lengthening" more? I liked it more because it was a fresher take on the genre, and explored the Holocaust off of a recently discovered home movie taken pre-Holocaust in Poland, and the search to learn more about the town of Nasielsk, and if anyone could recognize any of the people in the home movie, and if anyone who was seen in those three minutes was still alive. I found this all to be very interesting. I also found the eyewitness accounts of what happened in Nasielsk a few years later when the Germans came in to round up all the Jews to be especially sad and powerful.