Conversation following the screening with Bianca Stigter, director of Three Minutes— A Lengthening and Glenn Kurtz, Presidential Fellow and author of Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film.

Moderated by Stephen Galloway, Dean of Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, Chapman University.

In 1938, David Kurtz, accompanied by his spouse and family friends, returned to Nasielsk, Poland, the town of his birth. As a child, David had emigrated with his parents to the United States, and this was his first trip back. He brought with him a 16 mm camera, a novelty at the time. While there, he shot three minutes of film, much of it in color, not knowing that this film would be the only visual record of the town’s Jewish life and population. Most would be murdered in the years following the German invasion of Poland in 1939.

Intrigued by the Kurtz footage available on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and then by Glenn Kurtz’s book Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film, filmmaker Bianca Stigter examined the historical film with the lens of an archeologist, ultimately editing—in her words—“the footage in different ways to bring to life as many of the facts and stories about Nasielsk as possible.” Her film is “an experiment that turns scarcity into a quality” and that “investigates the nature of film and the perception of time.” In the process, she enables us as viewers to “partake in the creation of a memorial.” The film is narrated by awardwinning actress, Helena Bonham Carter.

Bianca Stigter is an historian and cultural critic. She made the short film essays Three Minutes-Thirteen Minutes-Thirty Minutes (2014) and I Kiss This Letter – Farewell Letters from Amsterdammers (2018). She was the associate producer of Steve McQueen’s feature film 12 Years a Slave and in 2019 published the book Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940 -1945. Glenn Kurtz is a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. Three Minutes in Poland was named a “Best Book of 2014” by The New Yorker, The Boston Globe and National Public Radio. Stephen Galloway has been dean of the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts since 2020. Prior to joining Chapman University, he was the Emmy-award winning executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter. He is the author of Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century.

This event is co-sponsored by the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts