A special guest post today featuring the short documentary ‘Tarkio Balloon. The film is the first in ‘The Lost and Found Series,‘ a series of five documentary films by a collective of filmmakers “exploring what it means to lose something and what we can potentially gain from finding it again.”
Tarkio Balloon – Directed by Torben Bernhard from OHO Media on Vimeo.
In 1985, at two-months old, Dane Morgan Bernhard died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in a small town called Tarkio, Missouri. 25 years later, Torben Bernhard jumped in his car with an 8MM camera and drove from Utah to the Tarkio cemetery his brother was buried in to understand the tragedy that shook his family when he was two-years old. Using an audio interview recorded years earlier with his mother, Bernhard paints a poetic portrait of his family’s loss and explores a child’s perspective of death and mourning.
With stark black and white images of the crumbling town and cemetery, juxtaposed with the sincere account of a mother to her son, Tarkio Balloon captures the innocent hope of a child amidst the unpredictable harshness of reality.
‘Tarkio Balloon’ had its world premiere at the 8th Annual Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.

Go Torben! Woo woo.
How beautiful: I love the low-fi, grainy imagery… the superimpositions that suggest the overlap and obscurity through which we remember those we have lost.
While running today I was thinking about ‘Lost and Found’: I saw people fishing, metal-detecting for treasure… It seemed to me that everyone was looking for something. My running, too, offers me a physical way of expressing the intangible losses I have experienced. To see a balloon, or visit a grave… these things are comforting.
I have no idea what it must be like to lose a child… this film is certainly a fine tribute to your parents’ courage.
Lovely thoughts Andy. I’ve been thinking about this too, how do you think it applies to lost testimonies?
I think our unconscious minds work through both metaphorical and metonymic channels… that is: through linguistic connections and tangible ones. As for metaphor: we talk at church about ‘losing our testimony’, and we’re forming a powerful way of thinking about evolving faith: carving paradigms that set up orthodoxy as the ‘path’, and any development from that as ‘getting lost’. I can’t help but have absorbed those paradigms, and I think I run against those. Other people are searching for other things… we live in a culture of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’… almost everyone feels like they’re lacking something, I think: the loss of a completeness they felt as a child, before the powerful exclusionary narratives piled on top of each other.
Of course, I have to remind myself that the differences between ‘loss’ and ‘release’, ‘finding’ and acquisition of a burden are differences of perception. The state of mind where we are happy to release ways of thought that are no longer useful, and happy to discover untrodden paths: that is the spirit of adventure, and it takes a brave soul to live that way. There’s so much territory to cover, though: so many treasures to be found… and the adventurous soul will never get bored. I run to remind myself of this: I’m not running towards or away from anything: but through the world.
To enact adventure, or the willingness to move between yet-unexplored paths, I think, is a way to get my mind more accustomed to the liberating pleasure of movement. I really believe that where the feelings are the same, our minds go through very similar processes… so whether it be through material action, dream, fantasy, or other areas of life: we train ourselves in every case to live in a certain kind of world.
I feel it was really important to me that I didn’t ‘lose’ my temple recommend (I still have it – though I’ve let it expire), but I have ‘found’ a whole world of flavours, aromas and pleasures in my introduction into the world of previously-forbidden beverages. These are so much more than drinks, or slips of paper… they are a way for me to rewrite the narrative of orthodoxy, into a narrative of movement, flow and discovery.