A short piece of found film becomes a fascinating journey into the past in Bianca Stigter's haunting and moving documentary.
In 1938, when the three-minute film at the heart of this documentary was shot, the small village of Nasielsk had a population of seven thousand; almost half were Jewish. By the end of WWII, only one hundred of the village's Jews had survived. As its title suggests, the celluloid itself is interrogated using a plethora of techniques, mining it for hidden histories.
What makes Stigter's film so compelling is how the footage transforms. As its title suggests, the film lengthens what we initially see into a detailed account of the disappeared. Narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, the celluloid itself is interrogated and probed using a plethora of restoration techniques in an attempt to mine it for hidden histories. This investigative narrative gradually unearths the backgrounds of the multitude of faces seen in the footage, not only lending them context, but also commemorating their existence. What starts out as an innocuous glimpse of a moment in time becomes a deeper, richer understanding of the people who pass before us and the value of their lives.
