In October 2021, the New York-based filmmaker Julia Loktev flew to Moscow, amid nationwide protests in support of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Vladimir Putin's government had begun cracking down on independent journalists covering the protests, branding them as "foreign agents" — a designation that effectively stigmatized them and forced them to include disclaimers with their work.
Loktev began filming several of these journalists who courageously kept reporting on the abuses of the regime, including her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk-show host for the independent channel TV Rain. Hoping to capture the journalists' ordeal as nimbly and thoroughly as possible, Loktev became a one-person crew, following her subjects around their homes and workplaces and filming on an iPhone. She shot for months as tensions mounted, culminating in Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Not long afterward, all her subjects fled the country.
The result of her efforts is an extraordinarily tense and intimate new documentary, My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow. Loktev is currently making a Part II, which will focus on the same subjects as they try to continue their work in exile. Part I, though, is already a stunning accomplishment — a harrowing immersion in the daily lives of journalists who find themselves in a state of freefall.
The film is divided into five chapters; the first three take place in the months leading up to the invasion of Ukraine. We see Nemzer in the TV Rain studio, interviewing activists who advocate for immigrants, people with disabilities and other marginalized groups. We see journalists reporting from the front lines of the protests, and not conforming to state-propaganda talking points.
Whether they're data journalists, investigative reporters or feature writers, they all try to keep on working despite their "foreign agent" status, which some of them try to fight in court. Others mock the term and treat it as a badge of honor.
Most of Loktev's subjects are women in their 20s and 30s, and over the course of these five-and-a-half hours, we're moved by their sense of camaraderie and community, and also by their gallows humor. They hang out at each other's apartments and crack jokes about the likelihood that they've been bugged, or that they might be arrested or detained. As we'll see in the film's later stretch, they're not wrong to worry.
Loktev, who was born in the former Soviet Union and moved to the U.S. as a child, is a superbly observant filmmaker. In the past two decades, she's directed two fictional dramas, The Loneliest Planet and Day Night Day Night, both slow-burning character studies that took their time getting under your skin. My Undesirable Friends: Part I is a work of similar patience, and once Russia's full-scale assault on Ukraine begins, the movie has us fully in its grip.
After the darkly comic tension of the first three parts, the fourth and fifth chapters become outright horrifying. As the journalists make plans to flee, the story's center of gravity shifts to a reporter named Ksenia Mironova, whose fiancé has been imprisoned for treason, and who must make the heartrending decision whether to stay or leave.
It's impossible to watch My Undesirable Friends: Part I without thinking of President Trump's ongoing attacks on the press. It's also hard not to see the film's events from the depressing standpoint of the present, with Navalny dead and the war in Ukraine still raging miserably on. Yet, as grim as it is, the movie isn't a hopeless experience. I came away with deep admiration and affection for these journalists, and for their devotion to their beleaguered but invaluable profession.
This is one of the most engrossing movies, fiction or nonfiction, that I've seen all year. Because it doesn't have an American distributor, it also hasn't been the easiest movie to see. It's now playing in select venues around the country, and if you have a chance to see it in a theater in the coming weeks, you should. Five-and-a-half hours may sound like a commitment, but once this movie has begun, you won't want to leave. And you'll be as eager as I am, by the end, to see what lies ahead for these intrepid souls in Part II.
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