At one point, Martin sat in a ditch in East Java and called the police. He asked them to come and pick him up. He was giving up.
They never came. He didn't know where he was, so neither did they. A few hours later the truck was cut loose, and the wood reached the island as planned.
That was the only time he considered quitting. In thirteen years.
The decision
Martin Vrana grew up in the countryside in southern Sweden. In his late twenties, after a couple of rough years, one question wouldn't leave him: is this it?
He resigned the next day. At the airport he threw his jacket in the bin and flew to Bangkok with a passport and a Visa card.
For five years he worked in hospitality in Norway and spent every winter in Southeast Asia. On the fifth winter he bought a piece of land on Gili Trawangan, a small island off Bali with no motor traffic. He transferred all his savings and signed a contract in a language he couldn't read.
Building it by hand
Friends told him to take a bank loan. He didn't. He went back to Norway and worked three jobs at once, peaking at around 450 hours a month, and came back with the money.
There was no road, no electricity and no fresh water. Martin carried cement and six-metre rebar across the island on a bicycle. The hardwood was second-hand, collected in Java and moved by truck across Bali, by ferry to Lombok, by small boat to the island and by horse cart to the plot.
He slept in the first building for years, under a mosquito net. One night there was a cobra above his bed.
What it cost
The first guest gave Lost Paradise a top review. The years kept going anyway, much slower than he had planned.
Martin describes a long, dark period. Shame instead of pride. A feeling of letting everyone down. He kept the project secret from his mother for ten years and only told her during the pandemic, with a photo album. He had decided not to start a relationship until the resort was finished. He thought it would take a year or two.
It was either I'm going to die while I'm trying to make it, or I'm going to make it.
Where he is now
Lost Paradise is finished. A local team runs it, and Martin has moved to mainland Bali. On the island, he says, he feels like a guest.
He is clear about the lesson: never put himself last again. Not his mental health, not his physical health.
Why I made this film
Martin and I both lost our fathers unexpectedly in our mid-twenties. We both answered by working far too hard. In very different ways.
I have new ideas all the time. Imagining fifteen years on a single one makes me want to run. But if I hadn't known how long it would take, like Martin, I would probably have kept going too. Every year you put in makes it harder to stop. Psychologists call it the sunk cost fallacy. Martin's story is what it looks like from the inside.
Read the original article about Martin.
This film is part of 100 Documentaries. The question it answers: what does freedom actually cost?
