Lost Lost Lost

The section's curators take a look back, searching beyond the mainstream for original productions from recent years that experiment with the language of film: overlooked titles, films that didn't get exposure at lesser-known festivals or were hidden in marginal sections, work by filmmakers who aren't afraid to take risks. Lost Lost Lost is a response to the phenomenon whereby the lifespan of films, especially those that aren't seen beyond the festival circuit, is surprisingly short, since festival selectors, who have to choose from an ever-increasing number of submissions, focus on new works.

This year, Lost Lost Lost will remain in the margins of cinema, the world and society. We will show characters living outside the mainstream, real and mental migrants, and the spaces they inhabit. Among other works, the program will include the black-and-white A Yangtze Landscape by Xu Xin, the director of the six-hour-long Karamay, which was an award winner in Locarno in 2010. This part-documentary, part-feature film shows the banks of the great Chinese river as viewed from the deck of a barge on a majestic voyage. The cool, static images of modern China are juxtaposed with portraits of people who have been forgotten and eradicated as a result of the changes that have taken place in recent decades. This apocalyptic vision of exclusion from modernity and from a world that that has become deformed is reminiscent of the early works of Jia Zhangke (Unknown Pleasures, Still Life) or Artour Aristakisian (A Place in the World, Palms).

Lost Lost Lost is also an opportunity to take another look filmmakers who have been associated with the idea of the New Horizons festival for many years. This year, we will see another film by one of Mexico's most interesting young directors, Nicolás Pereda. Although Pereda is often associated with the slow cinema movement, his films Perpetuum Mobile, Summer of Goliath and The Absent-all screened at New Horizons-prove that he is an experimenter who isn't afraid to take his work in surprising directions. It's no different with Minotaur, the story of a love triangle inspired by Alain Resnais' famous Last Year in Marienbad, with Pereda's favorite actor, Gabino Rodríguez, in one of the roles.

Maud Alpi's Still Life, winner of the Louis Delluc Award in 2016, also deals with relationships and the subject of our bodies. In her bold debut, the director shows a slaughterhouse from three different points of view: cows who can sense what awaits them as they are transported aboard trucks; a dog that runs nervously through corridors, sniffing out death; and his master, a slaughterhouse worker who uses pot to escape reality. In contrast to Ildikó Enyedi, Alpi does not resort to the conventions of fairy tales but instead combines the surrealism of the space in which death is mechanically inflicted with a sharp documentary eye, and asks the question: is empathy possible in a place where executions are carried out?

The section curators have been associated with New Horizons since its very beginning, first as spectators, then performing various roles on the team: Agnieszka Szeffel, Mariusz Mikliński and Mariusz Wojas.