Oscar-Contending Documentary ‘Three Minutes – A Lengthening’ Investigates Mystery Footage From Eve Of World War II
13.12.2022 - 20:13
/ deadline.com
In August 1938 an American visitor appeared in a Polish village outside Warsaw, bearing an object of considerable novelty to the townspeople: a 16mm motion picture camera. David Kurtz filmed for not much more than 180 seconds, his shutter opening onto village life in Nasieslk, home to a Jewish population numbering several thousand people.
Kurtz, who had been born in Nasielsk but immigrated to America at the age of 4, seemingly preferred to focus on the buildings, shops and synagogue of his birthplace, yet young people, especially, began to crowd into the frame, fascinated by the cinematic device. Kurtz hoped to make a travelogue; children intuitively understood it as an opportunity to be seen, to be somehow preserved on celluloid.
Those precious seconds of archival film, rescued from oblivion by David Kurtz’s grandson, Glenn Kurtz, are the basis for the Oscar-contending documentary Three Minutes – A Lengthening. Journalist and historian Bianca Stigter directed the film, co-writing it with Glenn Kurtz.
An eerie quality pervades the footage, or more precisely our experience of it: from our present vantage point, we know that almost every human being captured on the film perished in the Holocaust.
“Everything in the [archive] film is kind of joyous. The kids are jumping around, happy, and yet we hold the tragedy in us when we see them,” Kurtz notes. “That’s one of the things that makes the footage so powerful, is that the viewer is always in this position of appreciating the fact that the kids are laughing and screaming, poking their faces in the frame, and also knowing what [the kids] don’t know.”
Kurtz had seen the old home movie as a child, but decades passed before he recalled it again and went in search of the