A trip to the Oregon coast can be a relaxing getaway for many, but for Portland filmmaker Devin Boss, a visit to Yachats became a transformative experience. One of the fruits of that trip is a short documentary, “What We Lost Along the Way,” which captures the experiences Boss and two of his Portland friends had during their own journey to the coast.
As Boss says in the narration that begins the 15-minute film, a few years ago he was struggling with stress and anxiety, “brimming with pain, and nowhere to put it.”
Needing an escape, he spent “the last of my savings” on an Airbnb at the coast. He found the time there was “calming, soothing, therapeutic,” Boss says in an interview.
“There’s so much of the coast to explore,” Boss says. “But I think there was something super-endearing about that experience for me. I just knew I wanted to go back there, and share that same space with my friends.”
Boss, 34, did just that, after winning a $22,500 Outdoor Adventure Film Grant, awarded by Travel Oregon and Oregon Film.
“What We Lost Along the Way” is a sensitive record of Boss and his friends, Solamon Ibe and Mat Randol, experiencing the coast during visits to locations such as as Yachats, Newport, and Florence.
In thinking about the documentary, Boss, who, like his friends, is a Black man, found himself wondering, “Why do we assume this isn’t for us?”
The film acknowledges that Black people have a complicated relationship with nature, and Boss says there are reasons for that.
“I’ve heard of so many different experiences from Black people who have been out in the woods, and a white person will say, ‘What are you doing in my woods?‘”
In writing the grant proposal for “What We Lost Along the Way,” Boss thought about “how things nest in your soul, and your spirit. How things get passed down in a crazy way. You think about so many of these assumptions that we have, like Black people not wanting to swim, and thinking about when swimming pools were desegregated, and white people were running around throwing acid on black people in pools, and bleach, and crazy stuff like that.”
“It comes from somewhere tangible, somewhere real,” Boss says. “I think when I set out to make the documentary, I wanted to answer more of those questions, and I ended up doing a different documentary than I intended. It ended up being more about just healing with my brothers, and less about trying to answer a bunch of questions. It was more about sharing moments of connectivity with each other, and nature.”
“What We Lost Along the Way” can be viewed at the Travel Oregon website, and on YouTube.