This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from 2011 at the 49th New York Film Festival with The Loneliest Planet director Julia Loktev and lead actress Hani Furstenberg. Acclaimed artist and filmmaker Loktev returns to the New York Film Festival this fall with the NYFF62 Main Slate selection My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow.
Don’t miss the world premiere of My Undesirable Friends and many more great films by securing your Pass to NYFF62 today. Single tickets to the festival will go on sale on Tuesday, September 17! Learn more here.
Born in the Soviet Union, Loktev returned to Moscow in 2021 to make a documentary on the persistence of independent media journalism in Putin’s Russia—just months, as it turned out, before the country’s invasion of Ukraine. Structured in five chapters, My Undesirable Friends is an extraordinary vérité document of a moment of immense change and anxiety.
In The Loneliest Planet, Julia Loktev crafts an intimate relationship film starring Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg as young fiancés backpacking through the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia. The two characters are joined by a mountaineer, forming a trio that quietly treks across dramatic landscapes, where there is just as much said as left unsaid. Loktev dramatically expands her scope with The Loneliest Planet and in the gorgeously filmed mountains has found the perfect setting for isolated, at times suffocating drama.
Please enjoy the conversation with Loktev and Furstenberg from the 49th New York Film Festival.
The conversation was moderated by Richard Peña.
