Sundance Interview: ‘Three Minutes: A Lengthening’ Director Bianca Stigter

Author, journalist, and critic Bianca Stigter does magic in her documentary feature debut Three Minutes: A Lengthening. She takes the only existing three minutes of footage from a Polish town called Nasielsk before the Holocaust and extends them to create a memorial of a community whose life wasn’t shortened by the passing of time, but by violence.

The film is based on the book Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film by Glenn Kurtz, who discovered the footage, shot by his grandfather David while visiting Nasielsk in 1938, in his basement and managed to save it before it was destroyed by time. In them, we see a multitude of people on the streets excitedly waving and smiling at the camera which was a rare novelty at the time. We get a glimpse of a cafe, the synagogue, and not much more. However, it’s enough for Stigter to create something special.

With the aid of editor Katharina Wartena, Stigter rewinds, fast forwards, freezes frames, and zooms in to analyze in excruciating detail every frame of the footage. She describes the types of trees, identifies some names, tries to figure out the name of a store, tries to imagine the vibe and music playing inside the cafe, interviews a survivor who appears in the footage, and provides the harrowing explanation of what happened to the Jewish community of the village when the Nazis arrived.

Hot off of its Spotlight premiere at Sundance, I had the opportunity to talk to Stigter about the editing and research process behind the film, as well as Helena Bonham Carter’s narration and her book Atlas Of An Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945 being adapted by her husband Steve McQueen into a feature documentary.

Film Cred: How long did it take you to complete this film?

Bianca Stigter: I started working at the end of 2014, but I didn’t work on it permanently. During the process, I made a book and worked for a newspaper. Although I frustrated people (“Is this still not finished?,” they would say), in the end, I think the slow pace was beneficial for the movie because it gave me time to really think about: “Is this good or not? Should we add something?”) I feel every decision was taken with care, and that was good for the end result.

FC: What places did you go to complete the research?

BS: I’m based in Amsterdam and I went to Nasielsk, the town of the film. It’s very close to Warsaw. Most people from Nasielsk were murdered in Treblinka, so I went there to pay my respects. I also went to Detroit where the survivor in the movie, Mr. Chandler, lives. We went to him so I could record the interview that you hear in the film. 

FC: What was the hardest piece of research to do throughout the process? Was there something you were researching, but couldn’t get the necessary information to put in the documentary?

BS: When I started I was very keen on having a lip reader. I thought maybe we could figure out what the people were saying; you see them gesticulating and really speaking. But when we found lip readers who could speak the same Yiddish from the time, they said: “No, the fragments are too short and the film is too blurry, we can’t make it out.” Then I thought: “Okay, if we can’t have that, let’s think of words that would be used in any situation.” So I tried thinking of the minimum words people would’ve said, then we recorded them in English, Yiddish, and a little bit of Polish, the three languages that were spoken there. We had lots of people saying “Nasielsk” and there were different types of pronunciation, so it became a little poem of Nasielsk-saying.

FC: How did you keep the film fluid despite the fact that we’re seeing the repetition of three minutes of footage. How did you plan this? What kind of editing strategy did you have beforehand?

BS: My first idea was to not use other footage besides the three minutes. And then, of course, you have to find the rhythm to do that and give it a little bit of variety. The other part is a kind of detective or archeologist work to extract as much meaning from the material as possible. In the end, it was kind of an organic process. There were more stories about this town and the people that survived the Holocaust, but I only used the stories that I could link visually to what you see: it could be something small, but there had to be some kind of connection to what we were actually seeing. That eliminated a lot of stories and that was a good decision that helped me to know what to include or not. I loved the process very much. Mostly I write, and even though you have more tools with film, the principles of pace or how you distribute information are not that different.

Also, some things started to work in a metaphorical way, for instance, we have a long report from the Emmanuel Ringelblum archive about the deportations, but how can you show it, if the only official link you have is the market square? We used what little we had: we zoomed in on the image of the square until it became almost an abstraction that still makes you feel the absence of the town.

FC: What input did you give narrator Helena Bonham Carter?

BS: I wanted a beautiful and lively voice, but not something authoritarian that you tend to get in documentaries as if the narrator knows everything. 

FC: How did you work with Wilko Sterke to create the score of the film? I think it’s a tricky one. You have to be very careful with it because it could end up being manipulative or dramatic, but this is lovely, perfect for the occasion. How did you work with him?

BS: I knew I wanted music, but I didn’t know a composer. I read an interview in the newspaper with Wilko Sterke, I emailed him if he’d be interested. He came over, we had a conversation, he watched the film a few times, and he came back with this! We understood each other brilliantly, it was almost magical.

FC: What’s your take on the current landscape of non-fiction filmmaking? Is it getting more popular? 

BS: You see that a lot of people are watching nonfiction. I love both. For me, one is not better than the other. Now, most people can make movies themselves because of social media and the tools on their iPhones. My son is 12 and he’s already editing films. Maybe they’ll lower the threshold a bit and who knows, something great might come of it?

FC: What did Glenn Kurtz think of the film?

BS: It’s always hard to talk on behalf of someone else, but I think he likes it very much and feels it’s in the same kind of vein as his book. We tried to make something specific about this place and time, 1938 Nasielsk, and give a podium to the people you see in the movie. 

FC: Your book Atlas Of An Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945 is being adapted by your husband Sir Steve McQueen as a feature documentary titled Occupied City. How is that going? What can you tell us about it?

BS: They are still filming. It’s a long shoot. I go to watch sometimes but as you know, if you have no job on a film set, being there is very excruciating: you are just in the way. My job was more in the vein of helping out if something wasn’t clear in the text because I wrote some things in Dutch for Dutch audiences that had to be adapted for English audiences. But I think it’s not right to talk about something before it’s finished so we’ll have to see what it becomes.

FC: What material, either film, book, or any type of media, would you recommend for people who watched Three Minutes: A Lengthening and want to learn more about the themes?

BS: If you are interested in this particular story, it’s very good to read Glenn Kurtz’s book Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film. I’d recommend Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished about a film made in the Warsaw ghetto whose material is often used in documentaries, but in reality, was propaganda shot by the Nazis who did mise-en-scène, so it isn’t reality what you see there. A Film Unfinished is an insightful movie.