'Three Minutes: An Exploration', Fragments of a Jewish Village Missing in the Holocaust

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Jorge Semprún, a prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp, maintained that the truly traumatic thing about the Holocaust is that there were no witnesses.

«No one will ever be able to say: I was there.

Hence the anguish of not being believed.

And Claude Lanzmann, the great chronicler of the horror of the unspeakable and director of the monumental Shoah, insisted on that same assertion, that he had much to regret, with his radical refusal to recreate anything, to fictionalize anything.

Always aware that reporting necessarily means aestheticizing.

would be the question still unanswered.

the documentary by

which for just a few days can be seen on Filmin, keeps intact the limits of the usual controversy.

But, one step further, it renews it and even gives it a new meaning.

“We are too used to seeing the Holocaust as an unreal event and from such a remote past that it has nothing to do with us.

There is talk of six million deaths and in the enormity of the figure we hardly recognize an understandable number.

Would it change anything if it were much bigger or much smaller?

It is something so big that it becomes an abstraction.

It numbs your mind, it stops you », comments the director from the other side of the zoom in Amsterdam, where she lives.

Three Minutes - One Scan

is exactly what the title says.

The film shows a home tape shot in 1938 by

in the Polish town of Nasielsk located a few kilometers from Warsaw.

The author, an emigrant in the United States, recorded with a new 16 mm Kodak Magazine Film and with black and white rolls and with Kodachrome in color what was a family vacation throughout Europe and through the lands of his ancestors.

What the wealthy bourgeois could not imagine then is that the inconsequential images of the bustling streets and surprised by the event of a non-professional camera were about to become nothing, in the shadow of a shadow.

Months later, the accidental protagonists of that simple and supposedly innocent family memory

“I think,” says Stigter, “the first time I saw the images was on the Washington Holocaust Museum website.

I was fascinated by the feeling of closeness, of immediacy, that color gave».

The documentary that we are now seeing, and which began to take its first steps in 2014, is based on the investigation of

grandson of the author of the filming, and which is

.

From there, and thanks to meticulous forensic investigative work that has taken the director years, each one of the tiny mysteries contained in such modest testimony is unraveled.

The identification of the exact time of the shooting, of the grocery sign that leads to the name of its owner, of the trees, of each smile, of the reliefs that adorn the door of the synagogue, of the empty square in which they would be concentrated to his deportation most of those who leave there... And so on until reaching the only living survivor: Mr. Chandler.

“I remember,” says Stigter, “when I showed him the film his reaction was relief, but no emotion whatsoever.

said.

It weighed on her not being able to show anything or have anyone from his childhood.

The film, in a way, brought her childhood back to him ».

Three minutes: A scan is limited to showing the movie over and over again.

But with each viewing something changes.

Everything transform.

The image slows down, zooms in on a detail, stops at a gesture, contemplates a frozen frame... And each time it is seen again... it is seen for the first time.

And there the miracle.

Meanwhile, the narration in off by the actress

It provides the data, the figures, the names, the dates and, above all, the absences.

Since its premiere at the Sundance Festival almost a year ago, the film has only grown to become a living memory.

"The Holocaust in its most trivial definition was just an attempt to wipe out the entire Jewish population of Europe.

The film recovers something that was not erased.

It is something minimal, perhaps childish, but in its modesty, in its coarseness if you will, it ends up being extraordinary.

In a way,

adds the director.

The triumph is even greater, due to its agony, if one takes into account that the film was soon lost forever.

Much of it had turned into a mass due to the so-called vinegar syndrome.

A month later and restoration would have been impossible.

“The sensation of blurriness,” Stigter explains, “adds veracity.

It ends up also being a reflection on cinema itself, on its value as evidence, as testimony.

We live in a time in which the image is easily manipulated.

On the other hand, the Holocaust is getting further and further away.

The survivors are fewer and fewer.

For all these reasons, a film like this returns to us in its radicalness the value of memory.

We see people, people who before being killed enjoyed a life.

We see how they dress, how they smile, how they move... We see that they live».

Bianca Stigter makes her debut as a director, but her relationship with the cinema is long.

She is a journalist, researcher, historian and producer of much of

her husband.

And this is where movies like 12 Years a Slave fit in perfectly, albeit from a completely different side, with this documentary.

«I am interested in everything that is missing in memory.

What we forget is almost as relevant as what we remember.

And the memory of both slavery and the Holocaust shapes us as human beings.

They were the two most important episodes of recent humanity for what is monstrous and essential to explain who we are.

His memory is essential... I live in Amsterdam and every inch of this city is full of exciting and terrible stories.

It is precisely what happened in Amsterdam, street by street, during the Second World War that I have been working on in recent years.

And now it's a Steve movie,” she concludes.

Three minutes: an exploration

ends up being more than a simple film, an exercise in shared cinema.

each image until building the puzzle of everyone's memory.

What is seen matters, but the absence of everything that could never be contemplated, the unspeakable, is even more relevant.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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