The Lost Notebook
A young filmmaker stumbles upon an old notebook. The book belonged to a Hungarian man who wrote down all his cinema visits behind the Iron Curtain from World War II to the fall of the Wall. No less than 2,158 films are accurately dated in the cinematic diary – and he loved action films more than anything else! But who was the book’s mysterious owner and why did he document his trips to the movies in such detail? Ida Marie Gedbjerg Sørensen visits his family and draws a portrait of three generations in modern-day Hungary. Secret dreams and repressed traumas surface with every step she takes, as she delves into the mystery of his passion for film in a complex family narrative with many shadows and twists and turns. With film clips from the book’s 2,158 titles, this is a loving and creative tribute to film and the strangers sitting next to you in the darkness of the cinema. And it proves that filmmaking is not just an escape, but a place to meet each other.
Ida Marie Gedbjerg, born in 1990, is film director and anthropologist. She graduated from the international film school Doc Nomads in 2017. Along with her own projects, she teaches filmmaking at the youth film school Station Next. Her first documentary Qamar (2015) about a transgender refugee’s struggle won the first prize at Slemani International Festival 2017. Her graduation film In the Clouds (2018) was screened at DocLisboa-festival 2018.
