Lost & Found
In early 2022, Ben Grace came across nine rolls of discontinued Kodak Plus-X Super 8 film that had been refrigerated since 2007. Plus-X had been discontinued in 2010, meaning these rolls offered a rare opportunity: to potentially make one of the last films ever shot on the stock.
Rather than simply document the film stock itself, Ben wanted to create something worthy of its final outing. Lost & Found became a deeply personal, intimate story about family, absence and a son attempting to reconnect with his father.
Making the film presented an extraordinary set of technical challenges. The entire production had just 24 minutes of film available, all of it approximately 15 years out of date. With no possibility of obtaining replacement stock, every shot had to count. The production was effectively limited to a single take for every setup, with no opportunity for retakes if a performance was missed, the camera jammed or an exposure went wrong.
Before filming could begin, one of the nine rolls had to be sacrificed to determine how the stock’s sensitivity had deteriorated over the intervening years. This left just 21 minutes of usable film to shoot a 12-minute narrative short.
The challenges continued beyond the film itself. Super 8 cameras do not run at precisely 24 frames per second, meaning the externally recorded sound gradually drifted in and out of sync. Dialogue therefore had to be manually synchronised throughout the film. The principal location was also situated alongside a busy railway line, making every passing train a potential interruption to an otherwise unusable take.
Despite these limitations, Lost & Found was completed entirely on the expired Plus-X stock. The resulting film is both a personal story and a technical experiment in analogue filmmaking — a film shaped by scarcity, preparation and the unpredictability of a discontinued medium.
The film premiered in Germany as part of the 48th annual Filmfest Weiterstadt.
For Ben, Lost & Found represents the culmination of his approach to analogue filmmaking: careful preparation, an understanding of the limitations of the medium, and a willingness to embrace the imperfections that make shooting on film unique. It remains the film he is most proud of making.
Awards / Screenings
48th Annual Filmfest Weiterstadt (2024)
Official Selection
Southampton Film Week 2022
Test Screening / Q&A panel