The Venezualan drama “Lost Chapters” is a meditation on memory, both family and national history.

Its slight story about a student’s homecoming to her book-dealer dad to finish up research on a mysterious, “fake pseudonym” hustling Venezuelan novelist of the first half of the 20th century, returning to a “home” she barely knows and getting reaquainted with a grandmother who is losing her memory.

It might be easy to see this film through a Venezuelan political lens — people giving up on the country and moving away, giving away books they cannot sell, with those educated Venezuelans left behind losing themselves in the lost worlds of books.

But politics are never directly addressed, just the closing of a bookstore due to “the state of the country right now.” And it was filmed and released at home before the Trump administration took power, kidnapped the country’s president and took over its oil industry.

First-time feature director Lorena Alvarado, using a couple of family members as her “stars,” takes us into the edenic garden of her heroine’s (Ena Alvarado) grandmother’s verdant, whimsically-named house, La Ventolera, in Caracas.

Spending the summer there, 25 year-old “Eni” reconnects with that contemplative place, where everyone reads, where grandmother (Adela Rodriguez) drops pearls from half-forgotten poems and Dad (Ignacio Alvarado) plans the next’s day’s hunt for rare titles by Venezuelan and “only Venezuelan” authors.

We rarely hear so much as a radio. We never see a TV. Whatever Lorena Alvarado’s real experience is in her home country, it’s obvious she’s seen lots of French cinema, where TV sets are just props and only turned on when the protagonists are guests on literary, political or cinema-dissecting chat shows.

Plowing through her father’s warehouse packed with books, Eni’s obsession is finding one title — “Elvia” — by long lost to history writer Rafael Bolivar Coronado, one of the many psyeudonyms taken up by an early 1900s imposter novelist who’d steal the names of famous writers just to sell a book to a publisher, moving on to another famous name and we assume another publisher time and again as he built his “career.”

The shoe-leather element of the story is Eni and “Nacho,” her father, haunting the cluttered book stalls of street markets, visiting all of Dad’s fellow book-dealer contacts in their jammed stores that feel like archives to reading, publishing and Venezuelan history. The elusive “Coronado” and his many noms de plume is always her quarry.

Dad’s still keeping a foot in the business, hoarding every Venezuelan book he can, “antiquities of a past that never existed,” getting them from collectors who have died, families packing to leave the country and the like, every so often finding something rare enough to re-sell.

“Mamana” (granny) fades all through this, her one sure connection to the past a poem that begins with “Everything is the same.” But nothing is.

There’s not a lot for the viewer to grab hold of here. I was most fascinated by the hunt for a sort B. Traven figure — a writer who “covered” the Spanish Civil War simply by questioning sailors in Spanish ports, who wrote because he must and sold, by hook or by crook, anything he could.

The performances are “natural” in that untrained actor way, and emotionally flat as a consequence.

What attention “Lost Chapters” has earned has largely focused on the filming conditions — Alvarado used a crew of just two — and the fact that her sister and father have the starring roles. But as the stars of “Ishtar” long ago noted, “a baby doesn’t know how rich his parents are,” and degree-of-difficulty in making a movie never excuses its quality.

While what Alvarado puts on the screen is too polished and intriguing — at least in terms of possibilties — to dismiss, there’s no getting around the lightweight, incomplete and in the end inconsequential feel of “Lost Chapters.”

Another thirty minutes of movie and she might have told a richer story about memory, identity, a troubled country and the liberating isolation of tuning out and losing oneself in work in the arcane world of letters and lost authors.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Ena Alvarado, Ignacio Alvarado and Adela Rodríguez

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lorena Alvarado. A Several Features release.

Running time: 1:08