Lost Years
by Áron Horváth Botka
Izgubljena leta, fiction, c, 90 min
SI, RS
In progress
Borš, a grocery store clerk from a small Serbian town in the late 90’s, meets Tana, a young woman from Hungary, and joins her on a quest to find her lost backpack. On their journey through the Serbian countryside, an unexpected friendship blossoms, changing the direction of both their lives.
Áron Horváth Botka (1991) was born in Slovenia into a bilingual family and grew up as a member of the Hungarian minority. In 2016, he graduated in film directing from the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television in Ljubljana, and in 2021, he completed his Master’s degree in Film Studies. Since 2015, he has directed several short films, including Bits (2020), which premiered at the 23rd Festival of Slovenian Film in 2020 and received the Vesna Award for Best Short Film. It was later screen…
“Lost Years” is a story that has been on my mind for the past ten years. I began writing it as a creative exercise within the road-movie genre, but it soon became clear that something far more personal was taking shape. The script is based on fragments of childhood memories: carefree summers spent at my grandmother’s house in Vojvodina, and the sense of safety my family gave me even then, during the uncertain period that marked the Balkans in the 1990s. At first, these memories felt ordinary—pe…
Temporama has been working with the new generation of up-and-coming Slovenian film-makers since 2013. They’ve produced a number of short and experimental films, music videos, and webseries before transitioning to feature films with “Consequences” (Toronto IFF 2018). Their recent credits include the documentary film “Alpe-Adria Underground!” (DokuFest Prizren 2024) and “Ida Who Sang So Badly Even the Dead Rose Up and Joined Her in Song” (Torino FF 2025), with several other titles currently in pr…