Three Minutes –

This unique feature-length documentary consists entirely of three minutes of amateur home movie footage which briefly documents a Jewish community in Nasielsk, Poland, just a year before the Nazis invaded the town, eventually killing nearly everyone we see in the grainy moving images. By zooming in, sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically, to the footage on a granular level, the film offers a forensic excavation of both the contents of these three minutes of film and the nature of film itself, how it has changed us and the ways we see and record history. As director Bianca Stigter runs and reruns the original footage to draw meaning from each frame, the distance of history collapses into our immediate present, fuelled by a universal humanity and our relationship to the moving image. Stigter’s film, produced by Steve McQueen and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, serves as an insightful testament to the power of cinema as collective memory.