A poetic and vivid evocation of defeated youth looking back at Japan's extinguished student protest movement and lost revolution, Lost Lovers is a stylistically innovative and unusual art film that anticipates the drifting, melancholy cinema of Shinji Aoyama and Tomita Katsuya. Lost Lovers follows the picaresque adventures of an indelible anti-hero crowned with the bittersweet aura of faded glory, a former champion pole vaulter turned drifter whose aimless path leads him to Japan's remote North and into the company of a young deaf-dumb couple who calm the ex-athlete's restless anger and teach him a new intuitive relationship with the world. The debut film of documentarian Tahara Soichiro and playwright Shimizu Konio, Lost Lovers intermixes verité style and theatrical performance to inject a spirited yet thoughtful restlessness to the film's gently comic yet deeply poignant rendering of vulnerable dreamers.