A version of this story about “Three Minutes: A Stretch” first appeared in the Guild & Critics/Documentary Awards Editing from TheWrap Awards Magazine.
One of the most astonishing historical dig jobs of the year began with three minutes of footage shot by David Kurtz in a Polish town in 1938 before most of the Jewish inhabitants were sent to Nazi camps. Kurtz’s grandson, Glenn, began trying to identify the people in the film, and director Bianca Stigter expanded the clip into a feature film.
Glenn, what was the genesis of this project for you?
glen kurtz The weird thing is, I was working on a novel about someone who discovers an old home movie and then becomes obsessed with identifying the people in it. Researching that made me remember that my family had some old home movies. And then he passed me the story he was writing. As soon as I saw these images, I realized that these are almost certainly the only moving images in this community. And since I had inherited this film, I felt that the memory of these people is now my responsibility.
If I don’t try to understand who they were, then no one will and their existence will be over. So I became quite obsessed with identifying the individuals in my father’s film. That led to three years of research and my book, Three minutes in Polandwhich quite serendipitously led to Bianca and this film.
Was the rest of the movie just normal vacation-style footage?
kurtz Absolutely. It is a 14 minute long movie. The section in Poland lasts three minutes. The rest are absolutely typical vacation images that people are posting on Instagram or Facebook right now. It was my grandparents walking in historic or picturesque places and waving at the camera. The vast majority of the movie just goes, “Look, we’re here!” And the difference with the pictures from Poland is quite striking when you’re looking at it, because suddenly, instead of my grandparents taking the spotlight, the city life suddenly takes the spotlight. There are hundreds of people and children jumping around and trying to get their faces into the lens. These few minutes are extraordinary in the context of the film itself.
Bianca, how did you find out about Glenn’s book and the pictures?
BIANCA STIGTER A Facebook post saying that the original footage could be viewed on the website of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, where Glenn had donated the film. When I first saw it, I was immediately captivated, especially since it’s largely in color. It gives such a vibrant feeling of a community that was tried to be erased. And you feel that by seeing it you are working against its erasure. I immediately thought, can we make this last longer to keep this past in our present for a little over three minutes?
When you wrote your book, Glen, were you thinking beyond that? Did it occur to you that there was a movie here?
kurtz Not currently. When I donated the original footage to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, my goal was for someone to be able to see it and learn something about what was captured. Because when I discovered the movie, I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t even know what town it was. It took me a year to determine the city. My goal was to identify people, but how do you do that?
Originally my purpose in donating the film was just the crazy hope that maybe someone could help me identify someone. And well, surprisingly, that’s exactly what happened. Someone’s granddaughter watched the movie online and recognized her grandfather as a 13-year-old boy who appears for a split second in the film. And he is still alive. He is 97 years old, at the time he was 86, and he has some photographic memory. I call it the Rosetta Stone. He was the break in the case that made it possible to really begin to understand what we were seeing.
Bianca, how did you immediately see a movie in it?
STIGTER Well, I knew we couldn’t make it any longer. I wasn’t working as a filmmaker at the time, but luckily the Rotterdam Film Festival asked me to do a video essay. And I told them that what I would really like to do is work with this old material. So I contacted Glen and we did a 25 minute version first. But I had the feeling that there is more to do. And then we worked another five years to make the film what it is now.
When Bianca first approached you, Glenn, were you immediately interested?
kurtz I was very cautious at first because I had spent a lot of time trying to fight the tendency to generalize or imagine what people’s lives were like. My goal had been to identify the people and learn about their lives in as much detail as possible. But when Bianca and I talked, I recognized that she had the same sense, both of wonder and respect for the people in the film. And that her purpose was, as I had done, to try to excavate what is in the film, not to supplement it with other ideas or other stories.
So what are the particular challenges of taking those three minutes and, as the title says, stretching them out?
STIGTER Well, that’s why it took five years to get it right. You have to let the material breathe, in a sense, to get people into its groove. We had two ways to work. On the one hand, just letting people see for themselves and become familiar with the town and the faces. And on the other hand, it is a kind of detective story to extract all the information from the video. And also to show the difficulties and frustrations within it. For me, it has a lot to do with the film as a source and what it can give you to focus on something seemingly small.
You really can’t watch a frame of this movie without being acutely aware of what you know and what these people don’t know about what’s going to happen soon.
STIGTER Absolutely. That puts you, as a viewer, in a very difficult position. You are getting closer to these people, but at the same time you are aware of the ravines of time and history that separate you. You can’t warn them.
Read more from the Guild & Critics Awards/Documentaries issue here.
