Forgotten Fools

Frans van Erkel, The Netherlands, 2006
Synopsis

In July 1992, a group of patients from the Bosnian mental institution in Jakes fled the war in their country and went to Hungary. Since 1996, these patients have been residing in a wing of the refugee centre in Debrecen, where the rooms are clean but bare. The filmmakers talk to these people, who want nothing more than to return home, and they interview the psychiatrist in attendance, who wonders if there really isn't a single place in all of Bosnia for this small group of people. Back in Bosnia, they meet with the psychiatrist from the former institution; old video footage illustrates the devastations of war and the roaming patients who were unable to flee. Plaintive singing on the soundtrack accompanies a trip across snow-covered Bosnia, where the filmmakers visit the relatives of three patients and confront them with the homesickness of their relatives. The reactions are always similar: they were unaware that the patients were in Hungary now - or that they were even still alive - but Bosnia has a shortage of money, doctors and medicine. According to their relatives, and the director of a new institution in Jakes, they are better off in Hungary. Meanwhile, the official authorities decline telephone requests for information.

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