Pologne 1938, les vestiges d'un monde perdu

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but unless you have a personal connection to the Holocaust or unless you have professional interest in it, boredom is likely to wash over you as you watch this documentary. I won't recommend Three Minutes: A Lengthening to others. There is an obvious peril in taking three minutes of film and trying to stretch it into an hour-long documentary.

This documentary appeals to a fairly small number of people. I'm surprised by the generally positive reviews it has received if I'm being honest. Folks should be brave enough to characterize work like this as the underwhelming production that it is. You can take a pass on watching Three Minutes: A Lengthening without missing out on much.

Originally Premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival in the Spotlight Selection.

"Three Minutes: A Lengthening" is about a snippet of 16mm film offers an emotionally charged, meditative glimpse into the lives of the unsuspecting Jewish citizens of a small Polish village at the precipice of World War II. Director Bianca Stigter uses an entire 16mm film to offer a nostalgic experience about the topics of WWII and the Jewish people and it was an interesting take on researching and covering the topic from a cinematic lens. The presentation is well presented with really good uses of archival footage used throughout the entire film. The footage helps to add a feel of the past, the old days and what it must have felt like during the WWII years.

Helena Boham Carter's narration does provide the information nicely and her voice fits the scenario pretty well. However, the documentary does feel like it's a bit stale since the entire film is using footages, which does get a bit old at the end of the film. The pacing really really does drag and because of that, it made some parts unsatisfying and not as engaging as I was hoping for. Certain sound designs were noticeable that had some poor structures and some editing could be improved. In my opinion, this would have worked as a short film rather then being a feature limit film.

Overall, It's interesting to see a documentary about the Jewish people's lives in Poland from old archival footages but I feel like it was a little underwhelming by the end of the day. But I still recommend for those who are interested.

Rating: B-

An important film with good narration which I learnt quite a lot from. The most powerful part for me was the section on the community being beaten and rounded up to be taken away during December 1939. The film is short, about an hour or so, it pulls as much as it possibly can from 3 minutes of archive footage. It lacks context or explanations though about why this was happening, what was the situation in Germany and Poland during the 1930s. It never matches the film Shoah in it's scope and filmmaking art, in fact there is something quite uncinematic about this, possibly to do with the fact it was made during various Covid lockdowns in different countries. It is quite informative though and deals with a very important subject matter.

This is an unusual documentary that attests to the strength of the cinematographic image in recording the collective memory, not only of a people, but of humanity itself.

On a tourist trip to Europe, in the summer of 1938, an American businessman of Polish and Jewish origin, films three and a half minutes of the life of a small town, North of Warsaw, Naselsk, where his wife was originally from.

Popular curiosity causes around 150 people, mostly children, to appear in this small, partially colored, film.

Just one year later, almost the entirety of this Jewish population was taken to ghettos in various parts of Poland by the Nazis, and will end up exterminated in Treblinka or on the way to this infamous camp.

The few survivors recognize some faces, names and buildings from the film, thus contributing to the preservation of the memory of those people, abandoned by their own God.

An impressive experience.

Although this received excellent critical reviews and was only 69 minutes long, I wasn't sure how much I would like this one for two reasons. The first one was that the three prior reviews before me on IMDb were not very positive. The second reason is that over the years, Holocaust movies no longer break any new ground, and I find them to be mostly derivative. If you see my IMDb review for "Final Account," you will see that most people don't like that I didn't fall all over myself saying how great that documentary is. That's because I've seen that kind of Holocaust film (documentary or dramatic movie) so many times that I don't learn anything new, and it's an absolute bore.

So why did I l like "Three Minutes: A Lengthening" more? I liked it more because it was a fresher take on the genre, and explored the Holocaust off of a recently discovered home movie taken pre-Holocaust in Poland, and the search to learn more about the town of Nasielsk, and if anyone could recognize any of the people in the home movie, and if anyone who was seen in those three minutes was still alive. I found this all to be very interesting. I also found the eyewitness accounts of what happened in Nasielsk a few years later when the Germans came in to round up all the Jews to be especially sad and powerful.