A version of this story about “Three Minutes — A Lengthening” first appeared in the Guild & Critics Awards/Documentaries issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
One of the year’s most startling works of historical excavation began with three minutes of footage shot by David Kurtz in a Polish town in 1938 before most of the Jewish inhabitants were sent to Nazi camps. Kurtz’s grandson Glenn began trying to identify the people on film, and director Bianca Stigter expanded the clip into a feature.
Glenn, what was the genesis of this project for you?
GLENN KURTZ The strange thing is, I was working on a novel about someone who discovers an old home movie and then becomes obsessed with identifying the people in it. Researching that made me remember that my family had some old home movies. And then the story that I was writing happened to me. As soon as I saw these images, I realized that these are almost certainly the only moving images of this community. And because I had inherited this film, I felt that the memory of these people is now my responsibility.
If I don’t try to understand who they were, then no one will and their existence will have passed. So I became quite obsessed with identifying the individuals who appeared in my father’s film. That led me to three years of research and to my book, Three Minutes in Poland, which very fortuitously led to Bianca and to this film.
Was the rest of the film normal vacation-style footage?
KURTZ Absolutely. It’s a 14-minute long film. The section in Poland is three minutes long. The rest is absolutely typical vacation footage that people are posting at this very moment on Instagram or Facebook. It was my grandparents walking in historic or scenic places and waving at the camera. The vast majority of the film simply says, “See, we’re here!” And the difference with the footage from Poland is quite startling when you’re watching it—because all of a sudden, instead of my grandparents being the focus, the life of the town suddenly becomes the focus. There are hundreds of people and kids jumping up and down and trying to get their faces in the lens. These few minutes are extraordinary in the context of the film itself.
Bianca, how did you discover Glenn’s book and the footage?
BIANCA STIGTER A Facebook post that said you could see the original footage on the website of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, where Glenn had donated the film. When I saw it for the first time, I was immediately taken by it, especially because it’s for a large part in color. It gives such a vibrant sense of a community that was tried to be erased. And you feel that by watching it you’re working against its erasure. I immediately thought, can we make this last longer to keep this past in our present for a bit longer than three minutes?
When you wrote your book, Glen, were you thinking beyond that? Did it occur to you that there was a movie here?
KURTZ No, actually. When I donated the original footage to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, my goal was that someone might see it and we would learn something about what had been captured. Because when I discovered the film, I knew nothing about it. I didn’t even know what town it was. It took me a year to determine the town. My goal was to identify individuals, but how do you even go about that?
My purpose in donating the film originally was just the wild hope that maybe someone out there could help me identify someone. And well, shockingly, that’s exactly what happened. The granddaughter of someone happened to view the film online and recognized her grandfather as a 13-year-old boy who appears for a split second in the film. And he’s still alive. He’s 97 years old, at the time he was 86, and he has something of a photographic memory. I call him the Rosetta Stone. He was the break in the case that made it possible really to begin to understand what we were looking at.
Bianca, how did you immediately see a movie in it?
STIGTER Well, I knew that we couldn’t make it longer. I was not working as a filmmaker at the time, but luckily enough, the Rotterdam Film Festival asked me to make a video essay. And I told them I really would like to do is work with this old footage. So I contacted Glen and we first made a 25-minute version. But I had the feeling that there’s more to be done. And then we worked another five years to make the film what it is now.
When Bianca first approached you, Glenn, were you immediately interested?
KURTZ I was very cautious at first because I had spent so much time trying to fight back against the tendency to generalize or imagine what people’s lives were like. My goal had been to identify individuals and to learn about their lives in as great detail as possible. But when Bianca and I spoke, I recognized that she had this same sense, both of awe and respect for the individuals who appear in the film. And that her purpose was, as I had done, to try to excavate what is in the film, not to sort of supplement it with other ideas or other stories.
So what are the particular challenges of taking that three minutes and, as the title says, lengthening it?
STIGTER Well, that’s why it took five years to get it right. You have to let the material breathe, in a sense, so that people get into the rhythm of it. We had two avenues to work on. On the one hand, just letting people see for themselves and get acquainted with the town and the faces. And on the other hand, it’s a kind of detective story to mine the video for all the information. And to also show the difficulties and frustrations within that. For me, it’s very much about film as a source and what it can bring you to concentrate on something seemingly small.
You really can’t watch a frame of this film without being keenly aware of what you know and what these people do not know about what will soon happen.
STIGTER Absolutely. That puts you, as a viewer, in a very difficult position. You’re getting close to these people, but at the same time you’re aware of the ravines of time and history that are parting you. You cannot warn them.
Read more from the Guild & Critics Awards/Documentaries issue here.
