Patricia Highsmith (copyright Rolf Tietgens, Courtesy of Keith De Lellis)
Three Minutes – A Lengthening, written and directed by Bianca Stigter, and Eva Vitija’s Loving Highsmith are selected for the 7th edition of Sydney FF’s Europe! Voices of Women programme, presented in collaboration with European Film Promotion (EFP). The two docs, both sold by Autlook Filmsales, join fiction features by eight other outstanding European women filmmakers. The Sydney Film Festival runs 8-19 June.
Three Minutes – A Lengthening, produced by Family Affair Films (NL, Floor Onrust) in co-production with Lammas Park (UK, Steve McQueen), attempts to postpone the ending of a home film, shot by David Kurtz in 1938 in a Jewish town in Poland. The film is an essay about history and memory. And as long as we are watching, history is not yet over.
The three minutes of footage, mostly in colour, are the only moving images left of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk before the Holocaust. The existing footage is examined to unravel the stories hidden in the celluloid. Different voices enhance the images: Glenn Kurtz, grandson of David Kurtz and Maurice Chandler, who appears in the film as a young boy. Actress Helena Bonham Carter narrates the film essay.
Three Minutes – A Lengthening was made with the support of the Netherlands Film Fund and the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts. The film world-premiered at Venice Giornate degli Autori in 2021 and subsequently screened at numerous other prestigious festivals such as IDFA, Telluride, Toronto and Sundance.
The Swiss/German Loving Highsmith by Eva Vitija is a study of the late, great Patricia Hightsmith, the Texan novelist long acclaimed for her strange, cinematic stories of suspense, which captured the imaginations of directors including Alfred Hitchcock, Todd Haynes, and Anthony Minghella. Best known for penning ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ and its many sequels, Highsmith also wrote ‘Carol’ (aka ‘The Price of Salt’), her only novel to feature an unequivocal lesbian relationship.
In an intimate documentary, produced Ensemble Film and sold by Autlook Filmsales, Highsmith’s unpublished diaries lyrically intermingle with the personal accounts of people who knew and loved her. As the Sydney FF press notes stress, “the heart-rending character study depicts a visionary female writer, forced to repress her innate desires by a heteronormative society.” The film is also selected for Doc Aviv 2022.
European Film Promotion has put together an accompanying hybrid programme which includes a virtual European Women’s Audiovisual Network talk, as well as networking events and panel discussions on site for the filmmakers who are able to travel to Sydney. The women directors unable to travel to Sydney will introduce their films in short introductory clips shown before the screenings.
