[Filmin] A risky documentary that only uses three-minute fragments of images recorded in a Polish village shortly before the Shoah began. The interviews shown in off-screen serve as a kind of story of oral transmission, asking who of the 150 faces that were detected in that home recording could have survived the Holocaust. A detective work that is fascinating and keeps the attention thanks to the interventions/dialogues between the grandson of the author of the recordings and the narrator Helena Bonham-Carter. And at the same time that it recovers the town of Nasielsk for memory, it reflects on the way in which ancient images demand the need not to forget.
Review by Paladin5150BlockedParent2022-12-30T09:18:01Z
Three minutes of a grainy black and white and color movie, are all that could be salvaged from a roll of deteriorating film, found in a dusty attic, forgotten by the photographer, but discovered by the photographers grandson. Within those three minutes, we see glimpses of 150 or so faces, mostly of children, along with a sprinkling of adults, laughing. smiling, mugging, and clowning around for the camera, which at the time, was a never before seen marvel in this small Polish town. Home movies, taken by an American, on a European vacation to remember where he had come from.
Never could any of them have imagined that less than two years later, all but a few of those filmed would be evicted from their homes, rounded up and beaten like cattle, crammed into the very Synagogue pictured in the background. Then, those who had not already died or been executed, were shipped off to die at a place called "Treblinka" in the burgeoning of what was to be known as the "Shoah" or more common parlance, "The Holocaust".
Three minutes..., a 180 second glimpse into lives unfulfilled, destroyed by the unbridled hatred and demonic appetites of despicable EVIL men, as well as the cooperation and disregard of the thousands of complicit "citizens" who watched, and often mocked, jeered and laughed aloud, as their former neighbors were marched to their doom. They were quick to ransack the homes of the displaced of any valuables, or, would simply be given their neighbors homes, as a reward for their complicity.
Three minutes..., a minute glimpse at the calm before untold numbers of people from a multitude of backgrounds lost their sense of reason, their innocence, and their humanity
May we never forget, and may it never happen again. Shalom!