Collabfeature II: - The Lost Backpack - Chapter: Sorting it Out

2010, 110 minutes

A group of 25 independent filmmakers from all over the world come together to create a feature film made up of multiple individual stories.

On May 29, 2010, the first CollabFeature shoot began principal photography in a small village near Sao Paulo, Brazil. Rafael Yoshida directed the opening segment “Snowball Effect” for the multi-director feature tentatively titled “The Lost Backpack.” The film ties together 25 short films (3-4 minutes each) with a central object—a lost backpack trying to get back to its owner. The bag, the film’s hero, gets passed from character to character and country to country. Each segment presents a new little adventure involving the bag—each one from the mind of a different filmmaker. The segments range from comedic to dramatic to absurd and showcase different cultures, different languages and different film styles. In “The Gift”, a man from Ecuador steals the backpack, believing its contents to be of great value, and takes it to his estranged family. In “Home Going”, a homeless man carrying the bag, dies and ends up at a New York morgue. The morticians must look through the bag’s contents for clues to his identity. In “Heart-Shaped”, the backpack is accidentally mailed to a house in Dublin where two little boys are expecting a gift for their mother. In “Bullock Cart”, it ends up in Mumbai on a cart pulled by bulls that gets pulled over by a cop. Throughout the film, we learn about the owner of the backpack—a man named MacGuffin. Inside the backpack, characters discover clues about MacGuffin’s identity and whereabouts. As we travel with the bag all over the world, meeting a menagerie of colorful characters, the question persists: Will the backpack be reunited with its owner? Over the course of the summer, twenty-five filmmakers in nineteen cities, fourteen countries and five continents (African, Asia, Europe, and North and South America) will shoot their individually written and produced segments.