When Julia Loktev brought her camera to Russia, she didn’t know that she would soon capture history. At least, not to the extent that she did.
“This is a film where history happened as we were filming, which rarely happens. I mean, most docs are made about something that has already happened, and you’re trying to figure out how to tell the story of something that happened in the past,” Loktev told TheWrap. “In this case, I went to film something that was unfolding at this furious pace. There was no time between conception and execution. It was really ‘Shoot now. Keep shooting. Get it.’”
Now on Mubi, “My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow” follows a series of Russian journalists (primarily young women) living in late 2021/early 2022 Moscow. After being discredited by their state as “foreign agents,” reporters like Anna Nemzer (Loktev’s longtime friend and co-director), Sonya Groysman and Irina Dolinina attempt to document the rapid rise of fascism in their country, not knowing a full-scale war with Ukraine looms just over the horizon.
The result was a nearly 330-minute film (the first of two parts) chronicling the final days spent by a group of reporters and rebels in the country they called home.
In one particularly sobering scene, a reporter laments, “For 20 years, a monster was growing in front of our eyes whom we all fed with our silence and our passivity.” Loktev, who was born in Russia and raised in the U.S., is worried by how familiar the story she captured seems to developments back home under Donald Trump’s second presidential administration.
“Our guy grew a little faster,” Loktev said of Trump. “He was a little faster on the take.”
“Making up for lost time”
When Loktev and Nemzer set out to make a film together, they couldn’t know the full scope of what would come to Russia — and the world — in late 2021 and early 2022. All they could feel was the wind shifting in bad directions, with journalists being labeled “undesirable” as they reported the truth happening before their eyes.
“I jumped on a plane as soon as I got a Russian tourist visa and just started filming. At the time, I thought it was going to be a film about journalists facing a crackdown,” she said. “I ended up capturing this historic moment which led to a million people leaving Russia, this historic exodus of a huge number of the people that could have made it into a better society. They fled into exile when Russia started a full-scale criminal war in Ukraine.”
“My Undesirable Friends,” which released Friday on Mubi more than a year after its September 2024 premiere at New York Film Festival, marks the first film from Loktev since her 2011 feature “The Loneliest Planet.” The film, shortlisted for the 2026 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, clocks in at nearly five and a half hours — and is only the first half of Loktev’s planned “My Undesirable Friends” duology.
“I guess I’m making up for lost time,” the filmmaker laughed. “It wasn’t for lack of trying. I was struggling with writer’s block, and then I had a fiction film where I really loved the script, and it was getting somewhere, and then COVID happened. That film took place in three countries, and that particular film, parts of it initially started out during the protest movement in Russia and kind of segued into this.”
The journalists of “My Undesirable Friends” work for the news outlet TV Rain, itself declared an “undesirable” news source and “foreign agent” by the Putin regime. TV Rain — and any reporter with these labels — is forced to preface all of its reporting with a lengthy disclaimer warning of its foreign agent status (a disclaimer Nemzer and her friends refer to as “The f–kery”).
“Most of them are incredibly young. What do you do when you’re 23, when you’re 26, and the state has declared you an enemy of the people, a foreign agent? It’s a very natural response that you’re gonna resist, you’re gonna be like, ‘Screw you! You called me a foreign agent? I’m gonna make a ‘Foreign Agent’ T-shirt,’” Loktev said. “At the same time, it’s incredibly painful because you are being shamed in the eyes of society. It’s not funny at all, but so much of the film is about using dark humor, using joy, using community as part of resistance, because what else can you do? You can’t let them get you completely.”
But that’s the hard part. As Putin’s regime hastens its discrediting of journalists and war in Ukraine, Nemzer (who has a husband and child) and her fellow reporters are forced to reckon with the changing face of their country — and the restrictions placed against them within it.
“It’s important they love this place and are fighting for it, even though it’s sliding into authoritarianism,” Loktev said. “They’re trying to still make it a little bit better. At what point do you give up on your country?”
“That’s the question of the film: What does it feel like to be a decent person living under a bad government and trying to do your best to make it better?”
“A film that keeps transforming”
Loktev said her film has been described in many ways: a horror, a thriller, even a hangout film (“Yeah, it’s a hangout film about authoritarianism,” she laughed). Despite the daunting length, Loktev insisted “My Undesirable Friends” is “the most unmeditative five and a half hours of your life,” a film meant to allow you to love and live with the people at its center fighting through tragedy.
“It’s about life. It’s about living through something. We all know what happened: Russia became increasingly fascist and started a war in Ukraine. You really don’t need me to tell you. You can open a newspaper and we’re done. We don’t even need an hour and a half film, you can get it in 15 minutes. But what you get is the experience of what did it feel like to be living under this government, living your life every day.”
Loktev noted that the feeling is becoming all the more familiar to Americans under Trump’s second term. The filmmaker pointed to a Truth Social post a friend shared with her where Trump bragged about how the media has changed under his administration. Loktev initially thought the post was a joke.
“It’s crazy. I mean, look, when I started making this film, it was a film very much about Russia, which was very much a faraway place, so it felt like, ‘Oh, here’s all these kind of strange things happening to nice people in a faraway country that has nothing to do with us here,’” she said. “But this is a film that keeps transforming every day based on what’s happening in the world.”
When we spoke, the U.S. had launched a major military attack on Iran just over two weeks earlier. To Loktev, whose film depicts the early days of Russia’s Ukrainian invasion in its final chapters, this made the comparisons all the more clear.
“I was kind of comforting myself saying, ‘Well, Chapters 4 and 5 where you see this full-scale war, at least that’s not so relevant (to the U.S.) That is still very specific about Russia invading Ukraine.’ Then, of course, the last few weeks, we’re understanding what it feels like to be in this country,” she said. “I don’t think we’re horrified enough, actually. That’s something I think about a lot. There’s a passivity that I’m startled by.”
“We’ll remember it as Eden”
As Putin’s actions in Russia and Ukraine begin to further compound, Nemzer and her colleagues have no choice but to flee the country they call home. “My Undesirable Friends” depicts a collection of reporters leaving for Istanbul, one of the few places they could still buy a ticket from Russia, in early 2022. Loktev would join them a day later, spending that night downloading footage to the cloud via hotel WiFi in case her hard drive got seized at the border.
What they did from there will be showcased in her follow-up film, “My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile.”
“I’m so excited about ‘Part II.’ It’s almost done. I’m just shooting one last scene where one of the characters will likely be sentenced in absentia to prison. Cheerful things,” Loktev remarked. “I continued shooting immediately.”
When Loktev joined her friends in Istanbul, she found a collection of reporters whose lives had changed overnight. No longer did they know in which country they would lay their heads. They had no jobs, no working bank cards. As one character says early in “My Undesirable Friends: Part I,” despite the troubles faced at the time, “October 2021 — A year from now, we’ll remember it as Eden.”
How true that was.
“(‘Part II’) follows them as they get back up on their feet and continue to work as independent journalists to bring the truth to Russians. They talk about Russian war crimes in Ukraine. They offer an alternative to Putin’s propaganda,” Loktev said. “Then exile becomes indefinite, and they all keep working for years for the future of a country to which they may not return for decades.”
“My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow” is available on Mubi now.
