Three Minutes: A Lengthening is a documentary by Dutch historian and cultural critic Bianca Stigter. Its starting point is three minutes of amateur 16mm footage, shot in 1938 by David Kurtz during a visit to the predominantly Jewish town of Nasielsk in Poland. The footage captures fleeting moments of life before the Holocaust. Stigter investigates these brief scenes in detail, extending the three minutes into a 68-minute long exploration of history, memory, and loss.

The film has traveled the festival circuit, winning several awards for Best Documentary, and it boasts an impressive cinematographic pedigree—Academy Award-winner Steve McQueen is a co-producer, and Helena Bonham Carter provides the voice-over narration. Yet, many of the methods this documentary employs align with those of the video essay. Its meticulous analysis offers an almost forensic examination, using videographic tools as its scalpel.

Sometimes even those digital tools fall short. Because the closer you look, the less you see. Scratches and blotches replace and obscure details, only grain remains. In its quest for meaning and provenance, the 16mm film is even put under a microscope. To no avail: the images’ restricted resolution resolutely hides information. There is a poetic justice in the fact that text in particular falls victim to the limited definition of the film medium, as if the visual asserts its dominance over the lingual, blunting the power of words.

“What you see is what you know”, Bonham Carter states in her narration. She then directs our attention to a small ritual object that is visible on some of the doors in the footage, a detail only Jewish people might recognize. This is one example of how Stigter seeks a deeper understanding by focusing on minutiae.

But the film also finds that unlocking the mysteries from an image – any image, but certainly one that spent decades adrift in time – is much more complicated than just zooming in on details. Because sometimes we refuse to see things we know to be there. When one survivor recognizes himself in the footage, he also identifies one or two friends. Male friends: he doesn’t know any of the girls. Because of his religious upbringing, they were “beyond his scope”, as he puts it. Eighty years later, he looks at the girls intently for what is probably the first time. He finally sees what he wasn’t allowed to know back then.