Paradise Not Yet Lost (Oona’s Third Year)

More restricted in its scope than his other, more expansive film diaries, Paradise Not Yet Lost finds Mekas focusing entirely on the events of 1977. Divided into six sections, Paradise Not Yet Lost begins in New York, with fragments of Mekas and his family’s daily life and various visits and happenings around the city; from there, the film sprawls out to encompass a trip to Sweden, another journey to Lithuania (this time with Mekas’s wife Hollis and his nearly-3-year-old daughter Oona in tow), trips to Austria (to visit Peter Kubelka and Hermann Nitsch) and Italy, and finally, a return to NYC. Throughout, Mekas movingly organizes this material around the figure of Oona, aiming to provide her with a cinematic record of this early year in her life, a time she’ll barely be able to recall as an adult.

Screening with:

This Side of Paradise
1999, 16mm, 35m
In this short-form diary, Mekas collects images and memories from pieces of summers spent in Montauk in the company of the families of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill, yielding a rare, candid portrait of one of America’s most famous families.

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