Three Minutes - A Lengthening presents a home movie shot by David Kurtz in 1938 in a Jewish town in Poland and tries to postpone its ending. As long as we are watching, history is not over yet. The three minutes of footage, mostly in colour, are the only moving images left of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk before the Holocaust. The existing three minutes are examined to unravel the stories hidden in the celluloid. The footage is imaginatively edited to create a film that ... (Full plot summary below)
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Three Minutes - A Lengthening presents a home movie shot by David Kurtz in 1938 in a Jewish town in Poland and tries to postpone its ending. As long as we are watching, history is not over yet. The three minutes of footage, mostly in colour, are the only moving images left of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk before the Holocaust. The existing three minutes are examined to unravel the stories hidden in the celluloid. The footage is imaginatively edited to create a film that lasts more than an hour. Different voices enhance the images. Glenn Kurtz, grandson of David Kurtz, provides his knowledge of the footage. Maurice Chandler, who appears in the film as a boy, shares his memories. Actress Helena Bonham Carter narrates the film essay.
Leave your thoughts about Three Minutes: A Lengthening.
| Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerThe film medium has often been discussed in academic terms as a vehicle to contain the passage of time. But “Three Minutes” does much more than that. Although it raises all sorts of issues about the nature of the film image and how it can affect us, it is also the least theoretical of movies. We are bearing witness. |
| RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzBianca Stigter's documentary Three Minutes: A Lengthening is a great film about filmmaking and a quietly devastating memorial for lives long gone. |
| Washington PostAnn HornadayThree Minutes: A Lengthening unspools like a not-so-minor miracle. It’s a work of poetry, power and ruminative grace. |
| The Associated PressJocelyn NoveckAt the end, one feels gratitude not only for Stigter’s painstaking work, but to author Kurtz and of course his grandfather, just a man with a camera whose fleeting footage is a powerful response to those who intended to eradicate the existence of these people and millions like them. |
| The New York TimesBeatrice Loayza“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. |
| Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangThree 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. |
| VarietyAlissa SimonStigter’s method is simultaneously creative and forensic, but never sentimental. Working with a digitized copy that bears the blemishes left by the deterioration of the original celluloid, she conjures up exactly what she declares in the subtitle: a lengthening. |
| The Hollywood ReporterCaryn JamesAn eloquent meditation on loss, memory and how film can shape them. |
| The PlaylistJoe BlessingA poetic meditation on film, history, and loss, Three Minutes – A Lengthening gives a glimpse into a lost world and then unpacks just how much can be learned from that brief fragment. |
| SlashfilmChris EvangelistaThree Minutes – A Lengthening is not a ghost story, but it still feels haunting. |
