film

This superb little film shows what can be done with the smallest amount of source material if you drill down into it the right way. As the title suggests, just three minutes of footage provide the basis for the film: a home movie shot by David Kurtz in 1938 which captures everyday scenes of the Jewish community in the town of Nasielsk, Poland, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. The footage is one of the last visual records of the community in the town before it was decimated in the Holocaust. Before the war around 3,000 of the town's 7,000 population were Jews; just 100 or so survived.

Narrated by Helena Bonham-Carter and based on the 2014 book Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film by Kurtz's grandson, the American musician Glenn Kurtz, Barbara Stigter's film meticulously examines the footage. It is slowed down, scrutinised and contextualised, and a vivid picture emerges of the lives that were about to be so tragically shattered.