I Had Nowhere to Go

"The film has hardly any images, and it is not a mistake if you see a black screen. The twentieth century has produced millions of refugees, exiled and stateless. Some of them eventually settle down and find new roots, others continue to travel, waiting and dreaming of returning home. Born in Lithuania, Jonas Mekas spent five years in a camp for displaced persons in Wiesbaden and Kassel at the end of World War II before immigrating to Brooklyn. There, he started shooting films, especially his 'diaries' where he recorded his daily life as a young immigrant, and eventually became known as the 'godfather of American avant-garde'. The early years of this seminal filmmaker, having just escaped the century's worst nightmare, capture the story of the emigrant unable to ever go back and whose loneliness in the New World is emblematic of what Freud called 'the ordinary unhappiness' in the great metropolis" (Douglas Gordon). (Locarno Festival)