Young woman returns from Spain to visit her father. Arriving home she finds he is searching for rare books that will help preserve Venezuelan history and that her grandmother's memory is fading. When she finds a postcard stuck in a book, she sets off with her dad to find a previous unknown book.
If you have been going to New Directors New Films for any length of time you know that the festival frequently shows small films that, while good, are probably not going to get a huge release. It's not that that they are bad, rather that they are just so low key or atypical most distributors in the US wouldn't know what to do with them. Often, as in the case with LOST CHAPTERS, small also means short, in this case 67 minutes, which means most theaters won't play it. That means if you like small, atypical films, you are going to have to jump to NDNF in order to see it.
This is a low key film that isn't really about the plot. Told in longish static shots this is more about the relationships of the people and the ideas being discussed in their conversations. This is a film about family, about memory, about how we see the past and decide what to hold on to, and what we unexpectedly lose. It's a film where we follow some good people around for a while and see how they feel about the things in their lives. I know some people have compared it to a documentary in its approach but that isn't quiet right, while some sequences feel that way, others are most decidedly written.
I like the film. Its a small gem of a film. It doesn't have bells and whistles, it just quietly entertains and makes you ponder life. That this film is probably going to disappear from view here in the US is a kind of a sad sign about the state of American cinamtic tastes. That said, if you want to see something good, mae an effort to go see LOST CHAPTERS before it disappears from New Directors.
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