Popular reviews

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  Review by Ayelet 3

  My grandmother’s family is from Nasielsk. Her cousin is in this film; his name was Jankiel Piekarek. You can see him here, poking his face out from behind Maury, the interviewee who grew up in the town. Or at least, we’re pretty sure it’s him. Maury identified him, but he wasn’t mentioned in the film since, unfortunately, the only photos we have of him at that age are poor quality, and thus there is no way to verify beyond Morry’s hazy recollection that the boy in the video is indeed Jankiel. Glenn Kurtz talks a little bit more about him here in his book.

  My grandmother’s parents came to the US in 1922, but most of the rest of the…

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  Review by Brian Tallerico ★★★★ 3

  An experimental dissection of not just history but how we unpack and interpret footage of it. Very good. Made me sad in a way I could feel in my bones. Like watching ghosts.

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  Review by JBird ★★★★½ 1

  A doc that does something neat,
  Focusing on just one street,
  And really the length,
  Makes it a strength,
  With footage now feeling complete.

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  Review by joshrowley ★★★

  Constrained; haunting; important; interesting; repetitive; sad; short.

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  Review by Sara Clements ★★★★

  I closed my eyes during a part where Helena Bonham Carter is talking about trees and I haven’t felt so zen in two years 

  Sundance #2

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  Review by Justin LaLiberty ★★★★

  an incredible archival discovery and accompanying story, which thematically makes a worthy companion to A Film Unfinished; should be used as an example as how to treat important archival footage without altering it for commercial gain

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★

  A devastating and poetic work, Three Minutes A Lengthening is a luminous new documentary that provides a haunting meditation on the importance of remembrance and as an invaluable record of a world that once existed. Narrated by the incomparable Helena Bonham Carter, the film is constructed around three minutes of film shot in the tiny Polish town of Nasielsk, displaying its vibrant Jewish community. The grainy footage is the only visual record of this settlement and its people before the Nazis mercilessly arrived in their town. The documentary continually repeats the images of this single three-minute film, frame by frame.

  It spotlights the almost incomprehensible statistic of six million Jews, a number that will always be staggering, who Nazi Germany…

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  Review by Marianna Neal ★★★★ 1

  TIFF 2021 - Film #26

  This is quite an unusual film, and I don't even know if "documentary" is the right word for it. It's a look into the past, a brief glance at a community just before the horrors of the Holocaust changed it forever. It's a puzzle to be investigated and solved, faces of people who are difficult to identify, back from 1938. The fact that they were able to discover and restore this footage right before it would have been lost forever is incredible. This is a fascinating, small piece of history.

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  Review by Victor Morton ★★★★½

  THREE MINUTES: A LENGTHENING (Bianca Stigter, Holland/Poland/USA, 2022, 9)

  I learned about the death of Jean-Luc Godard shortly before I walked into the theater this afternoon, and I frequently thought about him during this film, which is my favorite of 2022 to date.

  Godard famously said that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. A bit less famously and more recently, he also said that anybody can make a film now, because footage is so easy to acquire and you can film a conversation in a car for two hours. Obviously THREE MINUTES suggests that second maxim more than the first, but it’s still sui generis and Godardian in the spirit in making a…

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  Review by Cineanalyst ★★★★ 5

  Lengthened Film, Shortened Lives

  Having written reviews several paragraphs in length for, and taking longer to read (and certainly longer to research and write) than view, early motion pictures lasting as little as seconds, I have an affinity for the eponymous concept of “Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” a documentary that takes a three-to-four minutes old family vacation film and replays, rewinds, pauses, cuts, and zooms in on it while narrating it and interviewing others about it for over an hour. The only image we see before the credits that isn’t from that film is of a model made of the street seen in it, and that shot doesn’t last very long. Of course, just any old family vacation film wouldn’t…

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  Review by George Napper ★★★★★

  “The only thing left is an absence.”

  An improbably unearthed segment of a 1938 family vacation film reveals a portrait of a prewar Jewish life in Poland — and the identities of several victims. 

  There is a moment in this film where director Bianca Stigter zooms way in on a road in a town square in one of the many frames of aged film she’s exploring, and even though visually it becomes almost nothing but brown static, its juxtaposition with the voiceover detailing the removal of Jews from Nasielsk (the town which was photographed) imbues the image with much more than just horror and obvious sympathy. The frame reframed encourages the viewer to reflect on the concepts of self-determination versus…

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  Review by Corwyn ★★★★

  The only thing left is an absence.

  The documentary opens with a roughly three minute long recording that was taken in a small town in Poland in 1938, not long before virtually the entire town's Jewish population was wiped out in the Holocaust. What follows is a thorough deconstruction and analysis of these three minutes, attempting to glean every possible bit of information about who these people really were and the lives they lived.

  More than merely an investigation into every nook and cranny of this homemade film, otherwise unremarkable but for the haunting historical context which hangs over it which none of the smiling individuals captured herein could've imagined, this documentary functions as an act of remembrance for those…