“This film is a letter to my father,” Lost Persons Area director Area Caroline Strubbe explains to Nick Cunningham
Strubbe's debut film, selected for Cannes 2009 and screening in IFFR 2010's Bright Future was, she stresses, inspired by an Elliott Erwitt photograph of lonely women on a bench beneath a Lost Persons Area sign. But the film suggests more Richard Avedon's bleak portraits of the disenfranchised poor within America's Midwest, a view underlined by Strubbe's extraordinary transformation of the Rotterdam landscape into something resembling the wide and dusty prairie. “I loved the open space, the flat open horizon. In some ways the film resembles a western, but it was suggested to me by a journalist that normally the hero enters the town and saves it. In this film, a man enters the town and everything ends in tragedy.”
In the film, the disillusioned Marcus – together with wife Bettina and daughter Tessa – has opted out of what he considers a society tainted by consumerism. He works as a foreman repairing power lines while his wife runs a canteen for his co-workers. Tessa meanwhile is a serial truant who collects ephemera from her surroundings to remould as bespoke items of sculpture. Into their lives comes the initially itinerant but reliable – and increasingly fatherly – Szalbocs, a Hungarian engineer. Benign and non-confrontational, his immersion into the story results in tragedy.
“My father was a pilot, so I spent a lot of time in the airport canteen with my mother and my two sisters,” comments Strubbe, as she unpicks the autobiographical elements of the tale. “We were always waiting for him at the weekends, playing pinball, eating chips, and my mother was a very beautiful lady entertaining the men. I liked very much to observe the world of adults. And my father was like a hero. But then he couldn't fly anymore and he lost all confidence and began to terrorise us and neglect us through frustration. My father was very nice and very original, and like Marcus he was also against society, but then we saw that his strength was like paper. When he couldn't fly he wasn't strong anymore. He became a mean person.”
So is a co-production about a bunch of Europeans gathered in one remote place, speaking mainly the lingua franca of English, a viable and re-usable business template to attract wide international audiences in the future? “Sometimes this construction can seem artificial,” Strubbe laughs. “But in this case it seemed very organic – maybe it was unconscious, with the film set in a sort of no-man's land, and with English being such a universal language. For me, it was exactly the way I wanted to go. But it also made the financing of the movie very easy.”
More about Lost Persons Area here.