Lost & Running [PG]

Good mates, six months, and an endless highway leading to adventure: Lost & Running chronicles the cross-country road trip and surfside adventures of a group of good Aussie friends. 

Don’t ask me why we have this in our library because, for the life of me, I have not got a clue. It’s actually my brother’s DVD, which I don’t think he’s even watched yet, that he somehow got his hands on (for free I think) when he was going through his beach bum, surfing phase… Whatever the reason it’s in our collection therefore I had to watch and review it. 

Good mates, six months, and an endless highway leading to adventure: Lost & Running chronicles the cross-country road trip and surfside adventures of a group of good Aussie friends. 

Ok, basically this is really just a half-hour feature of surfing footage with a few face-to-camera chats and roadside and in-car filming. It doesn’t sound like much and when you think about it critically, it really isn’t much, but this feature (I can’t call it a film) does offer its audience something. 

Being a doco, the in-the mix, on-the-spot method of filming, particularly scenes in the van, create this good sense of mateship and reality. In this day and age where people are documenting practically everything via their smartphones, this doco holds a fair bit of relevance and as such the intended audience will probably get a good kick out of it and be able to really identify with it. The other thing that I rather liked about this feature was its coverage of Australia. 

Not all footage comes from the beaches, though the majority of the screen is dominated by sapphire blue waves that both marvel and terrify, there is also telling coverage the rural country: the deserts, the country towns, the bushland, and the rabbit proof fences. On top of this we’ve got beautiful shots of some of Australia’s captivating wildlife including kangaroos, seals, dolphins, and even whales and it’s these little snippets of film that sends ripples of patriotism and love of country through you. 

Filmed, written, and directed by Nigel Davenport and featuring surfing from Paul Morgan, Brett Burcher and Justen ‘Jughead’ Allport, Lost & Running is a quick and captivating little doco that offers more to its audience than it appears to. Filled with beautiful shots of Aussie landscape and seascape, wildlife, dramas, and mateship, you can’t really call it a ‘film’ but it was a feature that I didn’t mind.