From filmmakerBianca Stigter, the new trailer forThree Minutes — A Lengtheningtrailer presents an unusual documentary, as a homemade video from 1938 is stretched out in the hopes of prolonging the only existing register of dozens of people killed during the Holocaust. Shot byDavid Kurtzin the Polish town of Nasielsk, the three minutes of the homemade footage are used as the starting point for Stigter’s investigations of the lives of the city’s population.
The new trailer presents Stigter’s curious experiment as the filmmaker tries to break down the homemade footage frame by frame, uncovering the stories that hide behind so many faces who were wiped from the face of the Earth. According to the director, the idea forThree Minutes — A Lengtheningcame from the bookThree Minutes in PolandbyGlenn Kurtz, which explores the same homemade footage. Fascinated by the book’s title, Stigter watched the footage available online through United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the first thought that occurred to her was, “Could you make those three minutes last longer, to keep the past in the present?”
That’s how Stigter started her quest of contacting the book’s author and dissecting the original footage, hoping that her efforts could help keep the victims shown in the video alive in humanity’s memory. The filmmaker’s goal, as she puts it, was to transform “scarcity into a quality” and help the viewer dig through the three-minute homemade footage like it was an archeological site.
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As Stigter explains her fascinating creative process:
“I contacted Glenn Kurtz, traveled to Nasielsk to see if any traces remained from the past, and went to Detroit to speak with survivor Maurice Chandler and his family. After this extensive research, I edited the footage in different ways to bring to life as many of the facts and stories about Nasielsk as possible. A few seconds of the recording of a cafébecome a dance scene, a single shot of the market square tells the story of the deportation of its Jewish citizens. All the faces that appear in the film are singled out and magnified to pay homage to the people of Nasielsk. The old images of the Polish town are combined with the way Nasielsk sounds today, creating a tense fusion of the past and the present.”
Three Minutes - A Lenghteningis written and directed by Stigter, withHelena Bonham Carterserving as narrator. The film is produced byFloor Onrustand co-produced bySteve Mcqueen.
Three Minutes - A Lenghteningcomes to theaters this spring. Check out the new trailer below.:
