Trailer for the movie ‘Lost Years’:

‘Psychoses discovered too late in family drama’ and ‘Youth protection agency failed in the murder of Kelly’. Two recent headlines in which psychosis played an important part. Psychosis is bandied about easily and frequently, but what is it, and what does it mean to have a psychosis?

These two questions are the foundation based on which JensenFrisbee decided to adopt this project. Over the years, JensenFrisbee has developed into a production company that films stories that – in addition to entertaining – need to be told. Lost Year’s need was crystal clear from the very beginning.

The idea came to Bas Labruyere, who has the disease schizophrenia and has had to deal with psychoses, while attending the Film Academy in Amsterdam. The story was originally drafted as a letter, because he wanted to share his experiences with the select group of friends and family he still had. Together with his brother Robert Labruyere, a graduate of the film academy himself, he later came to JensenFrisbee with the idea of filming the story.
Thanks to his own experiences, it has become a film with a strong impact on the viewer. In part thanks to the dramatic style, the viewer is swept along with the protagonist, balancing between delusion and reality. Thanks to a fantastic performance by Wouter de Jong, the unique story and the explicit style, you are forced to empathise with the protagonist. The film shows what it is like to live with a psychosis, with all its grim and limiting facets.

Parnassia Psycho Medical Care, the care centre where the idea to turn the letter into a screenplay was born, was a partner in the creation of the film. Together with them and Bas Labruyere, we looked at what we could achieve with a minimal budget. We finally decided to make the movie with a total budget of only 40,000 euros. With such minimal budgets, it is essential that the entire cast and crew work for appropriate (expense) fees. Thanks to the uniqueness of the project, and the network JesenFrisbee has built over the years, bringing together a committed crew was quickly achieved. Each department also worked with limited resources, making the work all the more powerful, requiring maximum creativity and flexibility.

JensenFrisbee is proud to have participated in a guerrilla project of this kind. The reactions from the field and from various viewers encourage us to continue along this path, and transform this project from a guerrilla to a commercial film plan. This development is ongoing, and we are working towards creating a synopsis together with Bas Labruyere. We want to use this synopsis to approach various institutions, and hope to share this project with a wider audience.