An exclusive interview with documentarian BIANCA STIGTER discussing the astounding and powerful THREE MINUTES: A LENGTHENING.
BIANCA STIGTER may not be a name you are familiar with, as yet, but you will be thanks to her feature documentary directorial debut with THREE MINUTES: A LENGTHENING; a fascinating documentary that gives voice to the people of a small Polish town, many of whom were taken to death camps not long after this home movie travel footage was shot.
One of the most fascinating documentaries you will ever see, thanks to 3 minutes 33 and 28/100ths of a second of denigrated Kodak film footage from a 1938 home movie, shining a light on a small Polish community just one year before the start of WWII. Shot by David Kurtz in 1938 on a 16mm camera he bought specifically for this trip to his birthplace of Nasielsk, Poland, these are the only moving images remaining of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk before the Holocaust.
Originally catching Bianca’s attention thanks to a Facebook post about this little home movie and a book by David Kurtz’s grandson Glenn Kurtz, three minutes gradually becomes 69 minutes as we see shriveled and barely discernible footage start to come to life through restoration and then analysis of buildings, signs, trees, architecture, clothing, fabric, buttons, caps and hats, and faces by religious, cultural, historical, and even scientific experts, all the while keeping the film images on screen, constantly sharpening in focus and zooming in with each new detail discovered. Narrated by Helena Bonham Carter we hear from some of the individuals who were actually filmed in 1938, as well as relatives and descendants of those we see on screen.
Take a listen to this exclusive interview as Bianca talks about how this project came to be and the step-by-step process of salvaging and restoring the almost completely destroyed film footage. Treating this footage as an archaeological artifact, Bianca goes to great length discussing the development of the film’s throughline and the decision to open and close the film with the uninterrupted and silent 3 minutes 33 and 28/100ths of a second and the emotional impact of so doing, the repetitive style of the editing and the editing process itself to showcase and reinforce each new bit of data that we learn, research and traveling to Nasielsk, scoring and the use of cultural and religious tones, the emotional importance of the discoveries made with each step of the restoration and expert analysis and, of course, her own passion for this project, for these people, for their families.
TAKE A LISTEN. . .
by debbie elias, exclusive interview 08/16/2022
