Baggage handling being what it is these days, there's nothing unusual about an unclaimed suitcase turning up in Sweden with 22 rolls of undeveloped film in it.

But when a documentary maker like Lucie Králová gets her hands on it, she's bound to discover something exceptional. Like any good filmmaker, Králová tends to see ordinary events in original ways, letting her curiosity get the better of her.

Whose film was it? Could there still be discernable images after the suitcase had been sitting in storage for God knows how long? Could the images, in the absence of any other identifying information, somehow lead back to the owners? And, if so, what would they say upon having their lost pictures returned to them by a Czech film crew?

Thus was born the documentary Lost Holiday, in which Králová poses and answers these questions — at least, all but the last one. For that, the resolution is most likely to come from millions of television viewers in China, where the writer-director is currently talking up the project. While there, she hopes to wrap up the final mystery in her two-year quest, which started as a student documentary film.

"People all said, 'You are mad to spend two years looking for some tourists,' " Králová says, and she doesn't disagree. "Definitely, we are mad."

Whether the idea was crazed or not, the film successfully mixes disparate elements into an engaging, enlightening cocktail. It's an adventure, a detective story and a lesson in the unconscious class consciousness of tourists with point-and-shoot cameras.

The search

The images on the rolls of film, still good, showed groups of Asian men standing in fields of daisies, in front of waterfalls, on bridges and on the edges of meadows. As for the locations and their identities, Králová and her crew had few clues. Most of the pictures looked like they could have been taken just about anywhere in the world, with the exception of specific desert and jungle regions.

Králová consulted with tourism experts, Asian studies professors and media professionals. She and her producer Zuzana Richterová interviewed sociologists, Sinologists and political scientists, and came up with humorously contradictory expert opinions.

The tourists were definitely Japanese, said one travel expert. Nope, Korean, said another. Most certainly Chinese, declared a Prague professor, who turned out to be correct. But then, he opined as to the chances of conclusively identifying the subjects in the photos, "The principal problem is that there are so very many [Chinese]."

Lost Holiday features many such lighter moments lampooning so-called cultural and media experts.

Based on the clothes the men were wearing, Králová became convinced that the men in the photos were Chinese provincial government officials, not businessmen, and not from a major capital. Through exhaustive research and luck, she happened across a man in Germany who believed he may have worked as a guide for the Chinese entourage. That led to the discovery that the travelers went from Northern Germany to rural Norway, where Králová was able to track down most of the locations in the photographs.

No slouch at publicity, Králová at one point organized an exhibition at the Mánes Gallery to help bring attention to her film. At the event, she had viewers pose with likenesses from the photos she found. It turned out that the position of the people in the pictures spoke volumes to experts versed in Asian traditional social hierarchy.

An older man seated in the foreground of the daisy patch picture, for example, was clearly the man with the most prestige, Sinologists told Králová. His entourage, following a pattern as old as ancient Chinese landscape paintings on silk, was invariably gathered behind him. The man standing a bit off to one side was the one who had organized the trip, they said.

The buzz

Králová presented excerpts from the film at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in July, hoping to find a distributor. At a festival panel called "Docu Talents from the East," journalists, film industry types and filmmakers all crowded into a hot press conference hall to catch a few minutes of Lost Holiday and hear Králová's story.

Nine other filmmakers from Hungary, Macedonia/Croatia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Poland, Slovakia, Russia and the Czech Republic also presented their work. But at the cocktail party afterward, it was Králová's film that was getting the biggest buzz. One of the admirers was Sean Farnel, director of programming for Hotdocs, a Canadian documentary festival, who said that work like Králová's makes events like the Karlovy Vary panel worth scouting.