Lost and Found

Pain separates us, everyone has a story, time heals us. These three thoughts sum up the entirety of Lost and Found, a film about love lost, the many different perspectives shared around an event, the ties that bind, forgiveness, and what defines family. The film revolves around the final week of the move out from the Garbus family's home in Manhasset, New York. The reason for the move out is that Leland Garbus and Claudia Marra are separating after thirty years of marriage. Their son, director Andrew Garbus, sets out to document the move out, hoping to discover, along with his family, where they once were and how they got to where they are at that point in time. The film however becomes much more than just this simple story of two parents divorcing. The film begins to increasingly turn towards Andrew, and while the film is as much an exploration of his parent's relationship with one another and it's disintegration, it also increasingly becomes about Andrew, his relationship to his parents, and how he is using the film as a process to cope with this ending of an era in his life. The film also follows his relationship with filmmaking, something that we learn developed at a very young age, and follows it through to the making of the documentary. As decades of tensions mount and the shoot begins to spiral out of control, the family must manage to come together somehow, in order to successfully move out of their house, finish the film, and perhaps realize some level of reconciliation amid the chaos and turmoil of the moment, as they prepare to turn the page and enter a new chapter of their lives.