Click here to copy URL

Three Minutes: A Lengthening

2021

Bianca Stigter

Documentary, Voice: Helena Bonham Carter

7.0

196

Documentary '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 ... [+]

	Media	Author	Review
		Alissa Simon Variety	"Rare home movie footage shot in Poland becomes priceless historical artifact, documenting people and places lost to the Holocaust."
		Caryn James The Hollywood Reporter	"Time regained in a beautifully made exploration of the past"
		Nicholas Barber IndieWire	"It should seem repetitive, but it grips the attention from start to finish (...) [This footage] stands as an invaluable document and a humbling memorial"
		Joe Blessing The Playlist	"A poetic meditation on film, history, and loss (...) [It] shows just how fragile our history of the Holocaust is"
		Brian Tallerico rogerebert.com	"Stigter's film makes the case that when we record even something as casual as a family vacation, we are capturing life in a way that's important (...) It's a powerful, essential piece of filmmaking"
		Dan Mecca The Film Stage	"Too often do we take for granted the miraculousness of the moving image. Stigter's creative extension and exploration of Kurtz’s film reminds us. What can we glean from three minutes of film shot in 1938? Plenty"
		Chris Evangelista SlashFilm	"I hope you'll seek out 'Three Minutes: A Lengthening', and let the weight of it all sink into your thoughts as those ghostly faces look back at you from all those decades ago"
		Justin Chang Los Angeles Times	"A snapshot, a memorial, a knotty philosophical detective story and a devastating account of Nazi atrocities"
		Elizabeth Weitzman The Wrap	"Just three minutes of 1930s film footage provides invaluable insight into a Polish village just before the Nazis wiped out nearly all of its Jewish population"
		Jordan Hoffman AV Club	"The imagery runs backward and forward (...) But director Bianca Stigter fully commits to this formalist dare—and it pays off tremendously"
		Peter Bradshaw The Guardian	"Arresting documentary [and] a gripping historical investigation (...) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"
		Ann Hornaday The Washington Post	"A fascinatingly contradictory film, exemplifying both loss and the resuscitative work of memory, and the permanence and fragility of film as a material object (...) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"
		Beatrice Loayza The New York Times	"[It[ 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"
		Kevin Maher The Times	"It's unnerving and important film-making about grief, loss and bearing witness. Moving pictures indeed (...) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"
		Rebecca Nicholson The Guardian	"Helena Bonham Carter is profoundly poetic in an astounding documentary (...) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"
		Tara Brady Irish Times	"[This] film essay rediscovers the lost Jewish population of the Polish town of Nasielsk (...) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"
		Davide Abbatescianni Cineuropa	"A commendable creative effort and a good example of how the usage of micro-history in film can be effective in unpacking realities behind global events"

Return to movie

We encourage you to check the reviews' original sources. Intellectual property rights of these reviews belong to their authors and/or the correspondent media from which they have been extracted. If you'd like to help us to add more reviews to your favorite movies, just send us a message.