David Kurtz: Last News

A poetic meditation on film, history, and loss, “Three Minutes – A Lengthening” gives a glimpse into a lost world and then unpacks just how much can be learned from that brief fragment. While on a grand tour of Europe in 1938, David Kurtz, a Polish-American man, traveled to Nasielsk, the town of his birth, and brought with him a 16mm camera filled with Kodachrome, a novelty at the time.

Ken Burns, Steve McQueen, Helena Bonham Carter Holocaust Docs To Feature On BBC

In August 1938 an American visitor appeared in a Polish village outside Warsaw, bearing an object of considerable novelty to the townspeople: a 16mm motion picture camera. David Kurtz filmed for not much more than 180 seconds, his shutter opening onto village life in Nasieslk, home to a Jewish population numbering several thousand people.

Documentary features, and really any artistic works having to do with history, often do not exist just to relay information but to make its audience not forget what it has to say. In that manner, few topics from more modern history are weightier to deal with than the Holocaust.

Super LTD has acquired North American rights to Bianca Stigter’s Three Minutes — A Lengthening, a Holocaust documentary co-produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), and narrated by Oscar-nominated actress Helena Bonham Carter (The Crown), which will be released in theaters next year.

Alissa Simon Film CriticRare home movie footage shot in Poland in 1938 becomes a priceless historical artifact, documenting people and places obliterated by the Holocaust in Dutch writer-director Bianca Stigter’s haunting and provocative documentary essay “Three Minutes – A Lengthening.” She utilizes the three minutes and some-odd seconds of 16mm film shot by American visitor David Kurtz in the Jewish quarter of Nasielsk to craft an original and incisive meditation on history, memory, memorials and the very nature of celluloid. Certain to be an international festival talking point, the poignant film should segue to an extended life in ancillary.Stigter’s method is simultaneously creative and forensic, but never sentimental.

Ann-Marie Corvin From an immersive look at female immigrants in 17th century Amsterdam to a forensic analysis of a pre-World War II home movie, approaching history from different angles is a key theme among the Dutch films selected for Venice’s 78th edition.Running in Venice Days, “Three Minutes — A Lengthening” is a poetic documentary that centers around three minutes of home footage shot by David Kurtz in 1938, featuring the Jewish inhabitants of a Polish town before it was invaded by the Nazis.From this footage a feature-length film emerges through former journalist and historical researcher Bianca Stigter’s analysis of the home movies’ subjects in a film that’s also bound for Toronto.