Julia Loktev Begins Lensing ‘The Loneliest Planet’ this Month

I forgot to add a much anticipated project to this month’s “Tracking Shot” (films going into production this month that are worth keeping an eye out for). Julia Loktev‘s The Loneliest Planet will be lensed far from the streets of New York, filming takes place in what I imagine will be the difficult Caucasus Mountains of Georgia – with thesps Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenber (Yossi & Jagger) onboard playing a couple who by the synopsis below, are on the brinks of their relationship in both an emotional and physical location sense. Production is expected to begin this month. Here’s our interview with Loktev back for Day Night Day Night. 

Sales unit Match Factory describes this as a chamber-piece set in a landscape that is both overwhelmingly open and frighteningly closed. A young couple is backpacking in the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia a year after tensions with Russia erupted in a brief war and settled into an uneasy peace. The couple hires a local guide to lead them on a several-day hiking trip, and the three set off into an alien, isolated wilderness. In a moment of fear, something happens, an involuntary gesture, a gesture that takes only two or three seconds, a gesture that’s over almost as soon as it begins. But once it is done, it can’t be undone; once it is done, it threatens to undo everything the couple believed about each other and about themselves. All the while, they are not alone. They are always with the guide, who observes their every move, their every failure. The film plays off the tricky context of global tourism, the inherent tension between young travelers and the places they travel to, the charged relationship between the guide and the guided. But at its heart, it is a love story – a tale about betrayal, both unintentional and deliberate, about masculinity, about failure and the ambiguities of forgiveness.