On day a letter arrived in my mail box. It was from a woman who wanted to tell me that she had read about my film in the newspapers and she had recognized the man on the photographs. She had known him from school. He had been one of her classmates. Because she included a phone number, I called her to ask some more about him. But she new only very little. I asked her for photographs and luckily it turned out that she still had one. A very important one in fact. It was a photograph of the whole class.
The next thing I did was to make an alliance with one of the cinematographers I had used in Uffe's Rum. We started a lot of research in to the faces on the photograph and suddenly we had lots of names and locations. We did a lot of interviews, visited schools and eventually established a connection to Uffes family.
It turned out that Uffe had started out on his trail 22 years ago.
Again, without pushing Uffe we got him interested in normal life. We took him under our wings, got him on national security. That way he didn't have to work as hard collecting bottles in order to keep himself alive.
We took him to art exhibitions, doctors, clinics etc.
In the end we got him to sign on for a flat which he had moved into by the end of the film.
Today Uffe is happily living in his own apartment. He makes beautiful water color paintings. What happened to him is a bit of a miracle. That is anyway what the social workers that work with these kinds of people say.