Lillian

An Eastern European immigrant woman stranded in New York decides to walk back to the country she came from. She sets off westward: miles, fields, gas stations, motel parking lots, and then the cold of Alaska. She does not say a single word in the whole film, and the America around her explains nothing to her. Andreas Horvath built the film out of a real woman, Lillian Alling, who in the 1920s tried to walk from New York back to Russia; her trail was lost in 1929 and whether she crossed the Bering Strait is still unknown. Horvath moves the story into the America of today. The eye of a documentary photographer is felt throughout. It screened in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2019.