Fotograf Magazine

It has been three years since Czech cinemas presented the documentary film, Lost Holiday, the laureate of the 2007 award for best documentary film over 30 minutes at the IFF in Karlovy Vary. In this film, director Lucie Králová attempts to discover the identity of six Asians pictured in discovered photographs.

The entire story starts in a garbage bin on the outskirts of Gothenburg, Sweden. A Czech traveler named Láďa Jelínek found a suitcase inside the bin containing 22 undeveloped rolls of film. Developing them left Jelínek with 756 seemingly ordinary holiday photographs of unknown people, the search for whom becomes the subject of the entire documentary.

The discovered suitcase triggered a three-year search for these tourists in the photographs. The creators worked with experts from the ranks of sinologists, criminologists, and later leaned towards unorthodox investigative methods, contacting fortune-tellers and people with extra-sensory perception.