“A Deteriorating Mind Condemned to Hell…”: Sadri Cetinkaya on Fantasia Doc Lost Boys

I first encountered Joonas Neuvonen’s Lost Boys, a sort of “unintended sequel” to 2010’s spectacular look at self-destructive Subutex addicts in rural Finland, Reindeerspotting: Escape from Santaland – which was co-written and edited by Lost Boys co-director Sadri Cetinkaya – at this year’s virtual CPH:DOX. At the time I tried but failed to take notes while watching. The film just got under my skin in a way that froze me to my laptop screen. 
 Atmospherically, Neuvonen’s decade-later doc brought to mind the sensation of being trapped inside a Nine Inch Nails video. Memorably narrated by Pekka Strang (Tom of Finland), Lost Boys picks up where Reindeerspotting left off: After serving a seven-year sentence for drug dealing, protagonists Jani and Antti escape to Thailand to celebrate with Neuvonen and his camera in tow. Predictably, the round-the-clock bacchanal revolves around sex, drugs, alcohol, more sex and more drugs. Unpredictably, while Neuvonen returns home at the end of the revelry the duo choose instead to fly off to Cambodia – where they promptly disappear. And then Jani turns up dead, his demise officially ruled a suicide, and that verdict prompts Neuvonen to return to Southeast Asia once again in a herculean effort to separate fact from fiction.
 Which also happens to be the task of the viewer. For though Lost Boys is a thoroughly engrossing, seamless journey into a very real heart of darkness, the film was actually shot piecemeal during the course of several trips. So how much footage was staged? How much of this madcap adventure truly occurred? And what effect did the director’s own arrest for drug trafficking – the takedown suspiciously captured on camera – have on production? Or is this film all one highly stylized, hallucinatory dream?
 To get answers to this and more Filmmaker decided to reach out to the Finnish filmmaking team just after the doc’s Fantasia International Film Festival North American premiere (August 5-25). Though Neuvonen himself seems to have now also disappeared, his longtime collaborator Sadri Cetinkaya was kind enough to shine a light on all the dark matter.

So to read all about it visit Filmmaker magazine.