In August 1938, an American visitor arrived in a Polish village outside Warsaw with an object very new to the townspeople: a 16 mm film camera. Filming for just over 180 seconds, David Kurtz opened his shutters to village life in Nasieslk, home to a Jewish population of several thousand.
Kurtz, who was born in Nasielsk but immigrated to America at the age of 4, apparently preferred to concentrate on the buildings, shops and synagogue of his hometown, but it was mainly young people who began to enter the picture, fascinated by the film medium. . Kurtz hoped to write a travelogue; Children intuitively saw this as an opportunity to be seen, to be somehow preserved on celluloid.
Rescued from obscurity by David Kurtz’s grandson, Glenn Kurtz, these precious seconds of archival footage form the basis of the Oscar-winning documentary. Three minutes – an overtime. Journalist and historian Bianca Stigter directed the film and co-wrote it with Glenn Kurtz.
An eerie quality pervades the footage, or rather our experience of it: from today’s perspective, we know that almost every person filmed perished in the Holocaust.
“All in [archive] Movie is a bit cheerful. The children are jumping around happily, and yet we carry the tragedy with us when we see them,” notes Kurtz. “That’s one of the things that makes the images so powerful, the viewer can always appreciate the fact that the children are laughing and shouting, putting their faces in the frame and also knowing what’s happening. [the kids] I do not know.”
Kurtz saw the old home video as a child, but decades passed before he remembered and began searching for the footage. He found it in 2009 at his parents’ house in Florida.
“It was in the original can in a box in a closet,” Kurtz tells Deadline. “The moment I saw this footage, I realized it had a profound historical significance.”
His grandparents are dead and he has no information about the footage – where and when it was filmed and what exactly it shows. He says he felt compelled to investigate.
“When I watched it as an adult, I realized that it is probably the only footage of this community before it was destroyed, and almost certainly the only existing footage of many of the people, especially the children, who appear in it,” says Shorts. “I felt a tremendous responsibility for her memory. And I figured if I didn’t try to find out who they were, no one would and their identities would be erased. This absolutely chance encounter with these faces alone sent me on a 13-year mission to identify the people in the film.
Kurtz donated the footage to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, which restored the film and made it available online. Then something remarkable happened. Of the few Jews of Nasielsk who escaped the war with their lives, one has been identified who appeared in the film.
“A granddaughter of one of these survivors happened to see the film on the Holocaust Museum website and recognized her grandfather as a 13-year-old boy,” says Kurtz. And he is still alive. He was 86 then, now he is 97.”
His name is Maurice Chandler and he immigrated to the United States after the war. Kurtz interviewed him for a book he was writing Three Minutes in Poland: Discovery of a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film.
“Mr. Chandler, with a photographic memory, could give so much more information than I could ever gather,” says Kurtz. “He lived in Nasielsk. He remembered what it was like. He could name people, tell stories about their lives, about his family and the people of the city, and that information was more or less the glue that began to bind all these fragmentary pieces I had collected.
By this time, Stigter had also seen the images of Nasielsk on the Holocaust Museum’s website, which inspired her own film journey.
“I immediately had this idea: Wouldn’t it be great if we could expand and expand this viewing experience,” she explains, “to keep that past a little longer in our present.”
She contacted Kurtz and a collaboration began.
“He made it possible for us to work with the images,” says Stigter. “At the Rotterdam Film Festival … we screened a 25-minute version [of the documentary]. “I kept thinking: ‘There’s more to it than that, we’re not ready yet. So I got a producer and then we worked on this film for another five years, I wish I could add more!”
Three minutes – an overtime runs 70 minutes. The only images in the documentary come from this original archive material, sometimes slowed down or enlarged, dissected, researched, reversed.
“The graphics are so extraordinary and so powerful that it gives you a much better sense of actually interacting with the material and getting into the story in some way than if you had talking heads and stuff like that,” notes Founder on There is no sound on the original footage – some in colour, some in black and white. The director added a few sound fragments here and there – birdsong, a car door closing.
“Just a few touches to get an idea of the sound,” says Stigter, “not too much.”
Commentary by Glenn Kurtz can be heard in the film, as well as an interview with Maurice Chandler. Actress Helena Bonham Carter narrates the film intimately and carefully searches for clues to the mystery of the images.
“I was looking for someone with a beautiful voice, but also an actor or actress who conveys the feeling that you are going on a journey of discovery together,” explains Stigter. “I wanted to make this an open film, yes we are a step forward, but we found it and maybe a viewer will find something else. No, it is not the voice of authority, it is the voice of discovery. And I think [Carter] know how to convey it very, very well.”
So far, eleven people seen in the 1938 footage have been identified.
“We always have the hope in the back of our minds that someone will see it and be able to give more information or recognize someone,” says Kurtz. “Each time the story reached a larger audience, new information emerged.”
On behalf of those who have been identified and whose names are still unknown, Kurtz expresses this wish: “That we remember … they were truly living individuals with their own lives, their own mistakes, their own dreams and their own culture and their own context. And every time we say, “Oh, we know what it was like for them,” we impose ourselves on them… I hope the film helps to preserve the individuality of these people so that they can be honored and even mourned. “
Author: Matthew Carey
Source: Deadline
Ashley Root is an author and celebrity journalist who writes for The Fashion Vibes. With a keen eye for all things celebrity, Ashley is always up-to-date on the latest gossip and trends in the world of entertainment.
