Since arriving in Brooklyn in 1949, displaced Lithuanian poet Jonas Mekas had recorded fragments of his life with a Bolex camera as practice for a future feature. Lost, Lost, Lost collects the footage from 1949 to 1963 to weave together a diary-document of Mekas's life: his aieties as an immigrant, his contact with New York poets, his gradual salvation in cinema. "The period I am dealing with in these six reels was a period of desperation, of attempts to desperately grow roots into the new ground, to create new memories … I tried to indicate how it feels to be in exile, how I felt in those years."