
Lost Persons Area. 2009. Belgium/Netherlands/Hungary/Germany. Written and directed by Caroline Strubbe. 109 min.
Strubbe’s debut feature premiered in the Semaine de la Critique in Cannes, where it won the SACD Screenwriting Award. The title is a reference to an Elliott Erwitt photograph of anxious women waiting in a Pasadena parking lot, although Strubbe’s displaced persons—a construction foreman (Sam Louwyck), his unhappy wife (Lisbeth Gruwez) and their silent, eerily independent seven year old daughter (Kimke Desart)—live in a sunny, vacant landscape beneath a high tension power line. Into this literally charged environment comes a Hungarian worker (Zoltán Miklós Hajdu) whose presence leads to tragedy.