The Storyville film Three Minutes: A Lengthening (BBC Four) is a combination of historical investigation, documentary and art piece. It is astonishing. It takes as its starting point a short home movie, just over three minutes long, shot in Nasielsk, Poland, in 1938 and discovered in a cupboard in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2009. It is a holiday snapshot of a few moments in time. Children see the lens and act up. A woman fixes her hair. A girl poses while smartly dressed adults walk behind her, trying to seem unaware that they are being filmed.
Although the camera captures them in motion, Nasielsk’s shops, people, streets and synagogue are frozen in time. In 1938, there were 7,000 inhabitants. Of those, 3,000 were Jewish. And of those 3,000 people, only 100 survived the Holocaust.
