Lillian, a Russian émigré stranded in New York, wants to return to her homeland on foot. Her mind made up, she sets off on the long journey – a slow-motion road movie, all the way across the USA, into the Alaskan cold. It is the chronic of a gradual disappearance. “Where is your family?” a poster asks at the beginning of the film in the middle of a no man’s land where the pursuit of happiness has increasingly become more a brutal obligation than a promise kept. Also due in no small part to this sort of peripheral observation, LILLIAN evolves into an essay full of powerful imagery on the “land of the free”, where freedom is often just another word for nothing left to lose, surrounded by poverty, the housing crisis and the decay of once booming industrial strongholds.

“A grandiose reflection on loneliness in the heart of America today” (Hollywood Reporter)

Andreas Horvath was born in Salzburg/Austria in 1968. He is an award-winning filmmaker and photographer, his films have screened at the Venice,
Locarno, Karlovy Vary, Rotterdam, London, Chicago and San Francisco film festivals, among others. LILLIAN is his first feature film.

Filmography (selection): 2002 THE SILENCE OF GREEN, 2004 THIS AIN’T NO HEARTLAND, 2006 VIEWS OF A RETIRED NIGHT PORTER, 2010 ARAB ATTRACTION, 2013 EARTH’S GOLDEN PLAYGROUND, 2015 HELMUT BERGER, ACTOR, 2019 LILLIAN