Three Minutes: A Lengthening features the only known images remaining of the Jewish community of Nasielsk, Poland before the Holocaust. The footage was taken by David Kurtz, grandfather of Glenn Kurtz, the author of Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film which inspired the movie.
Glenn spent four years researching and identifying the people in his grandfather’s footage, and he eventually found seven living survivors from the town on which his book is based. Expanding on this, Three Minutes: A Lengthening examines the three minutes of footage and begins with Glenn’s journey to discover more, work against erasure, and help connect a Holocaust Survivor with his lost childhood.
“This is a very rare thing that we have this footage, in color, of the Jewish community in 1938, in a small town in Poland, one year before the Germans invaded. I see it as a film against the erasure because that’s what was happening… the whole community was erased. So, here we have a document that shows you the raw power of recording, and an inkling of what it was like,” commented Bianca Stigter, writer and director of Three Minutes: A Lengthening.
Researching the Minutes
Super LTD
“Well, thankfully there was the book by Glenn Kurtz who already had done four years of research that we could then also use for the film,” explained Stigter when asked about how she conducted all of the research for the film. “So that was, of course, a tremendous source of data, and I did some additional research because it’s so rare everything that you can find out about. It feels as a kind of real discovery, as a kind of victory over the erasure. I tried, for the official part, to extract as much meaning from the celluloid as possible. If we couldn’t know the names of the people we see, can we at least find out as much about the other things we see? What are the trees? We see the flowers… what kind of things about the synagogue that we see, and so on… from all different angles to extract as much information as possible.”
Reception at Festivals
Three Minutes: A Lengthening has had a solid festival run, and was an Official Selection at TIFF 2021, an Official Selection at Sundance 2022, an Official Selection at Giornate Degli Autori 2021, and appeared at the Telluride Film Festival.
When asked if the reception was expected, Stigter commented that she didn’t have expectations. “This is my first film. So I didn’t really have a lot of expectations in that sense. I just concentrated on making the best film I possibly could, and to do as much justice to the material and try to create the kind of memorial to the people that we see in this movie. That was my main call.”
Maurice Chandler in Three Minutes
Maurice Chandler is one of the seven survivors that Glenn had based his book on, who appears in the three minutes of footage as a 13-year-old boy.
“He’s 97,” said Stigter, “and when he first saw the footage, he said to his children, ‘Now you know I’m not from Mars.’ Because when a whole culture is eradicated, you cannot show anyone or have your memory seen by anyone. So, for him, he said it took him back to his childhood, seeing this footage. When I first saw the shoot, it looks like a historical document but for him, it is memories. This is his past, this childhood that you see. This is, of course, a completely different relation to the material than someone who has no connection, so that made the material come so much more alive apart from all of the information he could give.”
Three Minutes: A Lengthening will be released in theaters in New York and Los Angeles on August 19, 2022. Steve McQueen is a co-producer of the film, which is narrated by Helena Bonham Carter.
Prior to the film, Stigter made the short film essays Three Minutes – Thirteen Minutes – Thirty Minutes (2014), and I Kiss This Letter – Farewell Letters from Amsterdammers (2018). She also served as the associate producer of 12 Years a Slave and Widows, and is the author of Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945. Today, she continues her work as a historian and cultural critic.
