THREE MINUTES - A LENGTHENING appoints itself a hefty task: to perpetuate time. The film, based on the book Three Minutes in Poland by Glenn Kurtz, is an extensive examination of roughly three minutes of home footage shot in 1938 in Nasielsk, Poland, by Glenn's grandfather David. THREE MINUTES is an analysis of memory, time, and documentation in terms of both content and form.

Nasielsk is a small town near Warsaw. Prior to WWII, the town's population of 7,000 was around 50% Jewish. David Kurtz was born in Nasielsk but immigrated to the United States as a child. Years later, David returned to his hometown with a film camera on a European vacation. Little did he know that just one year after he filmed, the Jewish residents of Nasielsk would be deported to Treblinka. Of three thousand, only 100 survived.

It is with this knowledge that we as viewers watch the footage of everyday Jewish life in Nasielsk. Kids play on the streets, families go to synagogue, a woman exits a grocery store. All are mesmerized by the camera, waving and smiling into its lens and your eyes. It is haunting to watch, knowing now what lies ahead for them.

Glenn spent the better part of a decade restoring and inspecting the 16mm film, identifying whatever and whomever he could. The film consists solely of David's footage. It is repeated, slowed down, sped up, zoomed in, recolored, and rewinded over and over again — an editing feat that never feels repetitive — layered over Helena Bonham Carter's narration, Glenn's recounting, testimony of survivors, written archives, and a soft but enveloping soundtrack.

As Bonham Carter narrates, "film, by itself, preserves detail, without necessarily conveying knowledge." And so this film tries mightily to attach knowledge to the detail we see in hopes of bringing the past into the present and extending it into the future.

It's an intriguing idea: if we are still watching, they are still living. If the children are still smiling back at us, time warps to expand into the present moment. With each rewind, they live again. And yet, the fact remains that we cannot hold on to this lengthened time; if you stretch something too far it will wear too thin to survive at all. We can prolong it, but we can't lengthen anything into forever.

Still, what else can we do but try? Don't we owe it to those we see in this film, the ones we wish we could pluck out from this footage, from the past into the present, and save them from their future?