Before Mekas had gangwayed right into the heart of the New York arts scene, he and his younger brother, Adolfas, were two of thousands of Lithuanian dypukai (displaced persons) set adrift from their homeland in the aftermath of World War II, living by their wits in an upended world. With Mekas newly arrived to the Lithuanian enclave of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a tight-knit émigré community centered around the Church of the Annunciation, the autobiographical home movie-diary Lost Lost Lost begins in 1949—documented with the 16mm Bolex that was among his first purchases in the New World—and ends in 1963 in the rural Vermont setting where Adolfas filmed his Hallelujah the Hills. Throughout, Mekas describes his slow slipping away from a Lithuanian past towards an American future, as the perspective of his camera eye changes from the observational to the wheeling, dizzy, ecstatic mode of his later work. The story of an immigrant’s reinvention is a familiar one, but what sets Mekas’ telling apart is the powerful melancholy—the sense of things lost in the fire. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the Avant-Garde Masters Grant, supported by the Film Foundation, and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation.