Why two Syrian musicians are risking everything to play Mozart from city to city when Europe is squirming in pain?
Universal themes of music and faith of Alaa and Tareq’s story are situated in the context of the conjoined telos of Dutch Artist Louwrien Wijer and German Artist Joseph Beuys’ who organized to bring Dalai Lama in Bonn to commence a programm entitled “Art Meets Science and Spirituality in a Changing Economy” that would ultimately gathered six Nobel prize winners and art world luminaries like Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Marina Abramović etc.
The connecting thread between these stories is a cancer-ridden Tunisian dancer who accompanied French artist Yves Kleine to the Papal Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi and, performed in Guggenheim meuseum for philoshopher Jacques Derrida and, now loosing her memory while her son retraces a strange and sublime history of now.
Lost in Love weave together three narrative strands :
1. A Bangladeshi filmmaker takes care of his ill Mother–a dancer loosing her memory due to the harsh cancer treatment– and travels through Bangladesh, India, Italy, France, Greece and Holland, in the process of tracing parts of his turbulent childhood.
Mother is Tunisian; born in Nice; an avowed masochist and, had moved in the circle of the first generation of performance artists etc. Mother had worked closely with Wilhelm Reich, Joseph Beuys, and the French and US Fluxus artists while abandoning the filmmaker–as a toddler– in a commune, with strangers, from where he was rescued by his father.
2. Through Mother’s and filmmaker’s past experience, in the 70s, we enter the narrative of Louwrien Wijer, a dutch artist, working towards realizing what Joseph Beuys called Eurasia, and compassionate currency; she brought together Joseph Beuys and Dalai Lama to establish a University in Tibet, a project which inagurated a five day conference, Art Meets Science and Spirituality in a Changing Economy, where art world luminaries like Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Marina Abramović and six Nobel laureate economist and scientists among others, actively took part. 3. While traveling in Italy, in 2015, the filmmaker befriended two Syrian Refugees: Alaa, a classically trained violinist, and Tareq, a polyglot poet and, professional interpreter.The film’s real narrative backbone is the filmmaker’s relationship with Alaa and Tareq that spans over 2 years: 2015-2017. In 2017, Alaa and his friend, an Italian, takes a trip from Treviso, Italy to Thessaloniki, Greece, playing music from town to town, with local musicians; while Tareq waits for them in Thessaloniki, he learns that, his Russian ex-girlfriend is pregnant with her child.
Lost in Love explores–through characters and narratives–an hitherto fore unseen world of a mixed artist communities which has it’s roots in what Joseph Beuys called pre–Christian impulses that find its latest reincarnation in an emergence of new humanity in the inter-being of locals and recently arrived foreigners, and in the birth to beautiful hybrids of emotional and,spiritual states,and quotidian rituals.The film will invite domestic and international audiences inside a world-making that might otherwise stay closed but if opened, could provide crucial lessons of tolerance, sharing of love, joy, vulnerability and, helplessness, in a mutually intertwining saga of overcoming fear and, an antidote to toxic masculinity and, identity politics to usher new beginnings.