Three minutes of home video, shot on 16mm film in 1938, give a glimpse of a small town in Poland and a Jewish community poised on the brink of the Holocaust. Bianca Stigter’s fascinating and profoundly moving film scrutinises each frame, repeating and looping the footage – prolonging the time we spend with these friendly, jostling strangers for as long as possible.
Combining a narration by Helena Bonham Carter, input from Glenn Kurtz, the grandson of the man who shot the footage, and accounts from historians that detail the horrors that befell the Jewish residents of Nasielsk, the film is forensic in its examination of seemingly insignificant clues and poetic in its patchwork structure. Part detective procedural, part memorial, its cumulative power is devastating.
In cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema
