“When you get lost,” says Rebecca Solnit, “you find yourself in a world that is larger than the one you knew.” For some, this is a nightmare. For others, it is a promise. This film, shot in Bahia (Brazil), reflects on different modes of getting lost: in the wilderness, in madness, in the ecstasies of love and love making, in the experience of sublime beauty. Loosing oneself is a script for misfits, outcasts, desperados, heretics, perverts: people in need of a world that is larger than the one they know. Yet the desire to get lost is not only expressive of a tragic condition. It also produces encounters with others, and stimulates that most endangered quality of the inquisitive mind: sheer and simple curiosity.
Mattijs van de Port
A visual anthropologist at the University of Amsterdam. In his films, all of them shot in Brazil, he keeps returning to realms of transgression – ecstatic religion, violence, eroticism and aesthetics – where humans face the fact that the world does not necessarily comply with their narrations of it. His filmwork includes Saborear Frutas Brasileiras (2013), about the joy of eating fruits and the essay films The Possibility of Spirits (2016); Knots and Holes (2018); The Body Won’t Close (2021); and Where Can I Get Lost (2024)? Van de Port’s films won several awards and prizes, including the prestigious Basil Wright Film Prize in 2021 and the Excellence in Visual Anthropology Award in that same year.