Three Minutes – A Lengthening 5 suns

This short documentary about a three minute section of color movie film is one of the most fascinating documentaries I have seen. A few years ago writer Glenn Kurtz found a home movie filmed by his grandfather, David Kurtz in 1938 for a vacation to Europe. Among the places he visited was Nasielsk, Poland, a predominantly Jewish village north of Warsaw that was David’s birthplace. The three minutes of film shows the faces of well over 100 people, all Jewish, who were in the street, many of them fascinated by the American who was using his new camera to film them. Of course the tragic thing is that only a year later the Nazis would come to the town and force all the Jewish residents onto the trains taking them to the concentration camps. Only about 100 people from the village would survive through the war. The filmmaker takes us through the extraordinary efforts to find the places and names of the people in this short section of home movie, leading in directions that would find some individuals still living. There are stories even about the fabrics worn by the women and the buttons of coats originating from a nearby factory. The writing has a poetic aspect to it as we realize we feel so close to these people through the pictures, but that the once thriving community was to be lost in such a short time.