Three Minutes Thirteen Minutes Thirty Minutes

Three minutes. Three minutes of 16mm film, mostly in colour, are all that visually remains from the predominantly Jewish town of Nasielsk, Poland, in 1938. One year later the world the film shows a glimpse of was obliterated. The vast majority of people we see waving at the camera were murdered in the Holocaust. But in the film David Kurtz shot in the town of his birth while on holiday in Europe they are alive, so alive. They seem alive even 76 years later, when we watch them now. What do these three minutes tell us?
The writer Glenn Kurtz, David Kurtz’s grandson, discovered this home movie a few years ago and in his moving book Three Minutes in Poland he researches the footage meticulously. Three minutes become 400 pages. Could the film itself be extended as well? How do you make it last? Can three minutes become thirteen minutes, or even thirty? Selected by Bianca Stigter for Critics’ Choice.