Lost Persons Area. 2009. Written and directed by Caroline Strubbe. With Lisbeth Gruwez, Sam Louwyck, Kimke Desart, Zoltán Miklós Hajdu. Cinematography by Nicolas Karakatsanis. Edited by Frédéric Fichefet. In English, Dutch, Hungarian; 35mm. 109 min.
The first film in Strubbe’s trilogy introduces us to its world via landscape rather than character: a flat, sun-bleached industrial plain dominated by high-tension pylons, where a construction foreman named Marcus (Sam Louwyck), his restless wife Bettina (Lisbeth Gruwez), and their eerily self-contained nine-year-old daughter Tessa (Kimke Desart) live in a canteen at the edge of a work site. The arrival of a Hungarian engineer, Szabolcs (Zoltán Miklós Hajdu), disturbs the family’s uneasy equilibrium in ways the film tracks through accumulating, subtle behavioral details. Nicolas Karakatsanis photographs the pylons and wire-strung sky with a matter-of-fact clarity that makes the landscape feel simultaneously mundane and ominous, a world charged with potential violence.
Strubbe wrote 27 versions of the script before filming, yet the result conveys observation rather than construction. The actors sometimes received whispered instructions mid-take; the camera crew frequently didn’t know in advance where a scene would move. The film premiered in Competition at the Semaine de la Critique at Cannes 2009, winning the SACD Prize for screenwriting.