Townspeople of Nasielsk, Poland, in 1938, as seen in Three Minutes: A Lengthening (Family Affair Films/U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)

For most, three minutes doesn’t seem that long. It’s the amount of time you need to watch a music video or microwave dinner or fill up your gas tank. But for the faces captured on film in Three Minutes: A Lengthening, 180 seconds mean everything. Those few minutes preserve the entire memory of the Jewish Quarter in Nasielsk, Poland: The vast majority of its residents were killed by the Holocaust’s cruel mechanisms.

Filmed by a Polish-American couple, David and Liza Kurtz, the Nasielsk footage was one of many reels taken during their grand tour of Europe in 1938, a full year before world war consumed Europe again. It wasn’t until over 70 years later that the Kurtz’s grandson Glenn discovered this footage tucked away in his grandparents’ Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, home, saving it just before the celluloid was irreparably damaged.

To the average viewer, the footage might appear innocuous. Thanks to Glenn’s tenacity and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s resources, it becomes something of a forensic file. They collaborate with the filmmakers to pinpoint the location of where the reels were shot via a synagogue door tied to the grandfather’s past. The more difficult task lies in tracing any survivors who appeared in the footage and, in turn, if some aspect of the town’s legacy survived. Of Nasielsk’s population of 7,000 in 1938, 3,000 were Jewish, but less than 100 survived the Holocaust. (Kurtz confirmed only seven remained alive by 2012.) Of that larger number, more than 150 were filmed by the Kurtzes.

The documentary relays the steps behind the footage’s restoration, and we learn how experts recolored clips based on non-decayed pigments, as well as how one can infer the time a segment was filmed, based on nearby sunlight. A single, blurred store signpost becomes a particular object of fixation for Kurt. Why? Because translating its blurry letters into something comprehensible provides a means of resuscitating Nasielsk’s lost past.

Yet not all of the past is gone forever. Lengthy segments are devoted to hearing the voice-over of Maurice Chandler, a Holocaust survivor whose granddaughter recognized him as a young boy on the museum’s website. It’s from Chandler that tidbits of history from the quarter are clearly detailed. He might not recognize every face, but he recalls the Jewish schools some boys attended, even the socio-economic implications of each child’s cap, which helped distinguish residents by education or class status. To temporarily avoid wearing one, Chandler admits, was almost an act of against his traditionalist parents. It also hints at the unique cultural ecosystem and hierarchies behind this working-class Jewish community. The camera’s gaze, however briefly, “scrambled that social hierarchy,” according to Glenn, and memorializes everyone as one spirited community.

What makes this gaze revelatory in documentary form is Three Minutes’ refusal to look at anything beyond the footage. There are a few diverse shots (a 3D model of the town’s environment), but those three minutes are primarily all we see. Any interview segment is presented only as a voice-over. In doing so, the movie lengthens our time in Nasielsk through repetition, as if to help the audience envision more of this town beyond what the Kurtzes recorded. Only when our narrators (including Helena Bonham Carter) stop to recognize an individual’s name or recount a tragic story does the camera grind to a halt, as if observing shiva through freeze-frames.

Those freeze-frames are where the documentary’s haunting nature shines. We never see any imagery during a retelling of the Nazi’s barbarism in December 1939: herding Nasielsk’s Jews into the town center, locking (and flogging) them in the synagogue, and ultimately transporting the majority of them out of the town by train. We don’t need to. The images we conjure up are far scarier, yet accentuate the tragedy that befell Nasielsk after the Nazis invaded Poland. Some brief recollections of heroism are included, but at heart Three Minutes’ story is about glimpsing a calm before the storm.

Three Minutes: A Lengthening’s uniqueness lies in its unorthodoxy: keeping a once-forgotten memory alive through film. Even with Chandler’s testimonies, neither we nor Kurtz can really paint an entirely rounded picture of this community. But if the townsfolk’s faces remain visible for the camera, their memory can be preserved. Unlike the recent From Where They Stood, which struggled with narrative cohesion, this film ultimately tells a looser story. It invites us to remember a moment in this town’s history where, for just three unassuming minutes, Nasielsk’s Jews were all that mattered.