THREE MINUTES: A LENGTHENING
D: Bianca Stigter (2021) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
For the duration of this 69-minute documentary, you're really just looking at three minutes of film. The footage was shot by an American tourist in 1938 in the Polish town of Nasielsk and it shows members of the town's Jewish community, men, women, kids, all ages, crowding the street. Some of the kids mug for the camera. Some of the grownups shoo them away. In the decades that followed, the footage miraculously survived. Most of those people did not. Under the Nazis, the Jewish population of Nasielsk was wiped out. Like Peter Jackson's World War One documentary, "They Shall Not Grow Old", or some of the movies of Bill Morrison, this one captures a moment, and by speeding the film up, slowing it down, reversing it, or zeroing in till all definition disappears, it effectively freezes time. It's also a detective story, a search made 70 years later to try to identify some of those faces. Most of them would be murdered during the Holocaust, and yet here they are, staring into the lens, still breathing, still laughing, in the only fragment that exists of their long-lost lives. Ghosts.
