It was during this time that Mekas’s interest in cinema bloomed. The US army showed movies, one of which, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, made the greatest impression on him. “Especially I remember liking the ending, and the desert, the sense of something crawling. Visually it was interesting. Then I saw another movie, Fred Zinnemann’s The Search, about displaced persons, made immediately after the war. I saw it with my brother and we got very angry about how little understanding of the real situation there was in this film, about what it means to be displaced. So we started writing scripts. That’s when we decided to make our own films.”Although he was a key player in American film history, Mekas’s early life in Lithuania played a significant part in his own film-making. He was born in the Lithuanian village of Semeniškiai, and in 1944, during the Nazi occupation, he and his younger brother, Adolfas, were arrested and taken to a labour camp in Elmshorn, Hamburg. They escaped eight months later, hiding on a farm near the Danish border for two months until the war ended. Thereafter, they lived in a series of displaced persons’ camps for almost four years.

To read more go to : https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jan/24/jonas-mekas-obituary

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