THE STORY – Julia Loktev documents independent journalists in Moscow facing government crackdown as Russia invades Ukraine, capturing their fight for speech amid risks of being branded “foreign agents” and the country’s drift towards authoritarianism.
THE CAST – N/A
THE TEAM – Julia Loktev (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 324 Minutes
Authoritarianism often shows up uninvited, but rarely unexpectedly. This is something many rationally-minded Americans are currently learning in real time. At the time of writing, the most recent notable offensive actions undertaken by the current regime include our leader unlawfully slapping his name on the living memorial that is the Kennedy Center and, of course, continually denying any connection to and attempting to divert attention away from the ultra-damning Epstein Files. By the time you’re reading this, there’s no telling what else may have been undertaken that spits in the face of the very idea of a free, democratically-run, and respectable nation. Both for those already well aware of the dangerous path our country is heading down and those somehow living in full denial of it, Julia Loktev’s expansive and powerful documentary “My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow” serves as a chilling warning. But even without looking for a comparison point, it’s a necessary, terrifying, and infuriating capture of the increasingly oppressive actions of Vladimir Putin’s administration.
The film specifically focuses on a collection of journalists working at TV Rain, one of the few independent news channels operating in Russia. It’s divided into five chapters, opening in the fall of 2021 and ending on March 2, 2022, less than a week after Russia invaded Ukraine in what the government euphemistically – and emphatically – referred to not as a war, but as a “special military operation.” Loktev follows a handful of TV Rain’s journalists, most of whom are women and all of whom are quite young. Notably, most of them were born after Putin first came to power, meaning they’ve barely known a Russia not under his authority (Dmitry Medvedev’s time as President from 2008 to 2012 was the only time this century when Putin wasn’t in charge). And yet, they still work in hopes of a better Russia – a fight made even more admirable by the fact that their experience with a Putin-less Russia is extremely limited.
As the film opens, TV Rain and its employees have been labeled “foreign agents,” a catch-all term that the Kremlin assigns to anyone they deem to be a threat to the governmental status quo. TV Rain’s journalists wear this distinction with a sense of pride. After all, if the oppressive ruling party feels they pose a threat to its authority, then they must be doing something right. This absurd categorization comes with a handful of equally absurd rules, including a prewritten message warning of their supposed foreign influence that must be displayed not only before every news report, but also on every social media post that the individual reporters make, regardless of its proximity to politics (TV Rain’s employees casually refer to this message as “the fuckery”). It’s essentially a more official version of the American administration’s habit of calling any media that they disagree with “fake news.”
Smartly, Loktev begins her film with a wide scope, covering a broad array of subjects related to TV Rain’s fight and subsequent oppression. She starts big and eventually gets narrower, with the time portrayed getting shorter and shorter with each chapter; the first chapter spans a month, and the final one is only four days. The first three chapters take place in the period leading up to the Ukrainian invasion, giving the film a sense of inevitable doom not dissimilar to that of narrative films that depict a period immediately preceding historical disaster, like “Cabaret” does with Nazi Germany.
“My Undesirable Friends” runs over five hours, with Loktev’s opening chapter beginning the film with what’s essentially an expositional segment that’s as long as some feature films. This has the effect of getting viewers totally connected to the journalists portrayed. And as the window of time depicted in each chapter gets smaller and smaller, in parallel with the increasing direness of the state of freedom in Russia, the film gains a natural sense of urgency. When combined with the audience’s familiarity with its subjects, this makes the film even more effective and appropriately disturbing.
Despite the obvious alignment between the director and her subjects’ political beliefs, Loktev keeps her editorializing to a minimum. The film was entirely shot on her iPhone, and she has made the smart choice to avoid more cinematic documentary techniques, such as talking-head interviews and archival footage. Instead, she uses only first-hand material of the journalists that she herself filmed, with the only disruptions of this filmmaking choice coming in the form of briefly displayed on-screen text toward the end of each chapter that provides contextual details from the future, telling viewers in chillingly blunt fashion what would become of the figures depicted. Loktev’s film feels as close to the action as the reporters’ work does.
The film’s length is undeniably daunting and, arguably, excessive (it’s hard not to feel as if certain segments could’ve used some tightening up in the edit), but the runtime allows Loktev to provide an avalanche of details for viewers who might not otherwise have a deep knowledge of Russia’s sociopolitical inner workings. But it’s not all distressing headlines and protest footage; there’s plenty of time in Loktev’s film to get to know the reporters on an individual, personal level. Their familial and romantic lives are shown to be not only as important to them as their political causes, but they also inform their convictions. For example, one of the reporters is gay and tells the story of how she met her partner while we see the couple baking a birthday cake for a friend – a human, almost unremarkable moment that’s underscored with a sense of dread since the face of the reporter’s partner is blurred for their protection.
But despite the constant threat of censorship (or worse), the reporters still manage to find joy and even humor in their daily lives. That comedic energy grows increasingly dark and even apocalyptic as the situation becomes more perilous, but “My Undesirable Friends” shows that the power of human connection and the fight for justice and freedom endure even in the most oppressive settings. It’s impossible to describe the film without calling it “urgent,” both in how it captures a precarious moment in Russian politics and in how it serves as a warning to other countries that find themselves in situations similar to those shown in the film’s earlier chapters. Julia Loktev’s stirring documentary is somehow simultaneously epic and intimate. And despite being 324 minutes long, at the film’s conclusion, viewers will undoubtedly be eager for the forthcoming Part II promised in the end credits.
