In collaboration with Starting from Scratch 

Lost Letters is an essay film in which the vanished nineteenth-century letters my great-grandmother wrote to her friends are brought back to life with the help of artificial intelligence. 

In my family's estate, I found a stack of letters in an old cardboard box that my great-grandmother, Keetje Hanlo-Tellegen, had received as a seventeen-year-old during her boarding school year at Sacré-Cœur in Vaals (1869–1870). The letters, from her friends in Groningen, had been carefully preserved: the ink was faded but still legible, full of girlish secrets, desires, and vivid descriptions of daily life at and outside boarding school. Intimate, playful, sometimes melancholic—small testimonies of girls growing up in a world of limitations.

But one voice was missing: Keetje's own. As I deciphered the letters, a pressing question grew: where were her answers? What did she think, what did she feel? Her absence touched me unexpectedly deeply. This project is my attempt to approach that absence—not with factual reconstruction, but with poetic imagination. Not a elaboration of what could have been, but an artistic exploration of what we might want to hear.

Lost Letters is not a nostalgic project. It is an invitation to listen anew – to what was once silenced, and to what it has to tell us today.