France3 IDF - 20 October 2022
Salem Film Festival USA - Official competition
DOCVILLE - Leuven Belgium
FIDBA - Panorama del Documental Contemporaneo
Salina DocFest - Official Selection
Rhode Island International Film Festival - Official Selection
DOCUMED Tunis - Official Selection
San Francisco Doc Fest - Official Selection
Festival International de Films de Femmes - International Competition
Festival dei Popoli - Competition
  • Popoli Doc Award
  • "Imperdibili" Theatrical distribution Award

SYNOPSIS

It's a never-ending flow. All day long, people come to the reception desk at the Lost and Found Office. They want to retrieve their belongings, they're in a hurry. But finding what has been lost is not an easy task. It requires time. The time it takes to wait for their turn and fill out the paperwork at reception. Time to explain what has been lost. Time to find the item in the warehouse and send it back with the freight elevator. It's best to surrender to the wait and indulge in the telling of what kind of setback, accident or misfortune has caused our loss, and brought us to this place.

Responsive image

SCREENINGS

Director's Statement

"Several summers ago, everything was apparently going smoothly, when suddenly my things started getting lost. Everything: keys, books, identity cards, papers. My days were littered with small moments of mourning. And then, amid this uninterrupted stream of losses, the most serious incident occurred: I lost my laptop. 

When I found it again, several weeks later, at the Lost and Found Service, I was awestruck: strangers who owed me nothing had looked after me. So that was how, when I went to find my computer, I discovered Rue des Morillons, this place devoted to loss. I loved spending time in the hall with its big windows and sturdy old furniture, where a crowd of bereft losers had wound up before me. I no longer wanted to leave this place. I wanted to stay there, surrounded by the others and their stories. I was intent on filming them."
Laura Lamanda
Responsive image

DIRECTOR

Responsive image

Laura Lamanda is writer and director. From 2005 to 2010 she worked as a Paris-based contributor to the culture pages of D di Repubblica, the magazine published by the daily newspaper La Repubblica. In 2008 she wrote the long form article Les tristes igloos du canal Saint-Martin, published in Sarkozy's France as Seen by the Foreign Press - Ed Courrier International. In 2009 she co-wrote the film Famille awarded at the Torino Film Festival. In 2012 she published the novel L’aeroracconto dell’amore fatale with Fandango Libri. In 2015 she co-wrote and collaborated in the direction of the documentary film Lupino CINE Plus Award and Young Jury Award at the Brive Festival. L’île des perdus - Lost and found in Paris is her first feature documentary.

PRESS

“A wonderful exercise in rearrangement, L’île des perdus weaves multiple tales, as intimate as the objects manipulated by the anonymous hands of the service agents, and, through the illumination of the images and the elegance of its perspective, acutely captures the forgotten space of the waiting room.”
Carlotta Centonze Filmidee
http://www.filmidee.it/2020/11/popoli-61-lanima-del-reale/
“Lamanda composes an inventory à la Prévert, whose foremost virtue is poetic [...] It is also, through the filmmaker’s eyes, a deep and moving reservoir of stories…”
Nico Bardot LE POLYESTER
http://fuckingcinephiles.blogspot.com/2021/04/critique-lile-des-perdus.html
“Immersed in the Lost and Found Department, Laura Lamanda – who is also a writer – brings her sober, precise, and benevolent perspective to this strange ballet of beings and things, with the former sometimes seeming the more lost of the two…”
Jérôme Provençal POLITIS
https://www.politis.fr/articles/2021/03/festival-international-de-films-de-femmes-filmer-disent-elles-43012/
“Laura Lamanda films the things she finds and leaves the viewer to make their own stories up around these, in an intimate ode to natural wonder and without the slightest effort to ingratiate. A beautiful discovery that must not be relegated to the Lost and Found of French cinema… ”
Jonathan Chevrier FUCKING CINÉPHILES
http://fuckingcinephiles.blogspot.com/2021/04/critique-lile-des-perdus.html
“Laura Lamanda […] observes a mosaic of human emotions in a cold, quasi-ascetic environment. A veritable anthill in which inanimate objects and human disasters evolve. Thanks to a reassuring frame, the vulnerability of ‘the losers’ is expressed. A spatiotemporal bubble in which the frenetic pace of the search for the lost object ceases, in favor of self-abandonment…”
Mélodie Auber MAZE
https://maze.fr/2021/04/films-de-femme-lile-des-perdus/
“Are the absent-minded, those who forget an intimate object somewhere, all the same? The answer is given by Laura Lamanda’s L’île des perdus, winner of the Imperdibili and Popoli Doc awards. Laura Lamanda filmed the to-and-fro that sets the pace of the Lost and Found Department, by reconstructing some of the users’ stories, often as captivating as a novel. »”
Lucia Evangelisti WALL STREET JOURNAL MAGAZINE
https://wsimag.com/it/spettacoli/64232-la-vita-con-occhi-diversi

PRODUCTION

  • MAKE
  • 61, bd de Belleville
  • 75011 Paris
  • France

SUPPORTED BY

  • CNC
  • Région Ile-de-France
  • Ville de Paris
  • Rodrigo Rodriquez
  • Richard Grigny

CREW

  • Director: Laura Lamanda
  • Photography: François Farellacci
  • Sound: Amaury Arboun
  • Editing: Laura Lamanda in collaboration with François Farellacci
  • Sound editing: Marta Billingsley - Simon Apostolou
  • Mix: Marcos Molina
  • Color correction: Vincenzo Marinese
  • Production: François Farellacci - Laura Lamanda
  • Production Manager: Paul-Philippe Casanova

CONTACT

Email our team at: contact@makestudio.fr