Where to Watch: Three Minutes: A Lengthening opens this Friday at Laemmle Royal with additional theatrical engagements to follow.

It’s the genuine spark that lights up the faces of nearly 150 men, women, and children as they look directly into David Kurtz’s camera lens, that hurts the most in hindsight. It was a fleeting moment during David’s sightseeing trip to Poland in 1938 and, if anything, he was inconvenienced by the crowd’s presence in his shot. He wanted to capture the beautiful architecture of the city but was instead met with curious faces and locals from the community infiltrating his framing. David captured roughly three minutes of footage here before continuing on his trip. Little did anyone know that a short time later, most of the people that David got on film that day would be dead.

Writer/director Bianca Stigter gives life and dignity back to those in David’s footage in the gripping documentary, Three Minutes: A Lengthening. Narrated by Helena Bonham Carter and co-produced by Steve McQueen, the film contains the only moving images that exist of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk, Poland before the Holocaust.

Glenn Kurtz, David’s grandson, spent four arduous years attempting to identify the people in his grandfather’s images. His search spanned various countries, film preservation laboratories, and even an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield, which he details throughout the film. Acting as part film historian and part detective, Glenn narrows down key details in the grainy footage that ultimately end up leading him to a precise location: Nasielsk, Poland. His search yielded tangible results too, as he was able to locate seven living survivors, one of whom contributes to the film.

Distributed by Super LTD, Three Minutes: A Lengthening is a powerful portrait of the lives lost and a poignant celebration of the power of film. With only three minutes of archival footage in total, Bianca Stigter creatively stretches and humbly manipulates the images to create a 70-minute feature that is ripe with emotional depth.

In a similar style to Dawson City: Frozen Time, Three Minutes: A Lengthening keeps the memory of the dead alive by preserving the last known artifact of their existence.