Three Minutes: A Lengthening
Winner: Best Documentary, Atlanta Jewish Film Festival
Winner: Best Documentary, Dublin International Film Festival
Winner: Yad Vashem Award for Excellence in Holocaust Documentary Filmmaking
“Best of 2022,” The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, IndieWire, TimeOut.
Directed by Bianca Stigter
Co-Produced by Academy Award-Winner Steve McQueen
Narrated by Helena Bonham Carter
“...an original and incisive meditation on history, memory, memorials and the very nature of celluloid.”
“...a work of poetry, power and ruminative grace.”
“‘Three Minutes’ is more than a documentary about the Holocaust — it is an investigative drama, a meditation on the ethics of moving images and a ghost story about people who might be forgotten should we take those images for granted.”
“Every second of a fragment of home-movie footage shot in Poland on the eve of the Holocaust is pored over in this poetic, devastating work.”
“These three minutes,... contain multitudes, as does this economical but richly expansive documentary. “Three Minutes: A Lengthening” is a snapshot, a memorial, a knotty philosophical detective story and a devastating account of Nazi atrocities. It’s also an extended rumination on the illusory, entropic nature of the cinematic medium itself. ”
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Three minutes of home movie footage, mostly in color, shot by David Kurtz in 1938, are the only known moving images left of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk, Poland, before the Holocaust. Those precious minutes are examined in intricate detail to unravel the human stories hidden in the celluloid. Tracing the story of those three minutes begins with the journey of Glenn Kurtz to discover more about his grandfather's film, ultimately leading to identifying people and places otherwise erased from history, and helping to connect a Holocaust Survivor with his lost childhood.