Three Minutes: A Lengthening

"There have been many films about the Holocaust during the last 60 years, but Bianca Stigter has done something unique and timely in her meditation on a home-movie fragment taken by a visitor to Poland before the Nazi invasion - a film that immerses us in the life that would soon be brutally erased, and in film as 'material history'." - Film Historian Ian Christie

A short piece of found film becomes a fascinating journey into the past in Bianca Stigter’s haunting and moving documentary.

Nasielsk is a small village some 30 miles north of Warsaw. In 1938, when the three-minute piece of footage that lies at the heart of this film was shot, it had a population of 7,000. Almost half were Jewish, and many were employed at the local Jewish-owned button factory. The film, once a snippet capturing everyday life, has become a record of a world that irrevocably changed.

Narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, the celluloid itself is interrogated and probed using a plethora of restoration techniques in an attempt to mine it for hidden histories.

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