The snippets of footage that are played and replayed in "Three Minutes: A Lengthening" open a window — smudged, weathered, mysterious, revelatory — onto a world that no longer exists.
To some extent, as noted by one of the interlocutors in this probing and ruminative essay film, this is the fate of most filmed nonfiction material, since the reality being documented is always in flux. But the weight of history lends these specific images an especially stark, sobering power.
Shot by a young Polish American emigre, David Kurtz, during a 1938 summer trip back to his hometown of Nasielsk, they represent the only known cinematic record of life in this tiny village before most of its 3,000 Jewish residents were deported and murdered in the Holocaust.
