Photo: Julia Loktev/New York Film Festival
My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, Julia Loktev’s tremendous new five-and-a-half-hour documentary about independent journalists in Russia, is hardly a network sitcom. But in what feels like a nod to the NBC show with which it shares part of its title, each of the film’s five chapters ends with credits that identify the main players by their diminutive and full names. It’s a wry touch — Next time on My Undesirable Friends, a very special episode in which Anya considers emigrating to Germany with her family! — but also an unexpectedly apt one. Despite its structure, My Undesirable Friends is very much meant to be considered as a whole, with a second part in the works that will follow its subjects in exile. But by immersing you in its community of increasingly targeted reporters, news anchors, and podcasters, Loktev’s film, which she shot by herself on an iPhone, does at times recall a hangout comedy. Or a workplace one, since it’s main locus is the offices of TV Rain, a channel that had been forced off the air and onto the internet years before My Undesirable Friends begins. The people she follows do like to joke, though they usually frame it as a choice between that or crying, and by the end, the balance has tipped from gallows humor to tears. Loktev’s film starts in the fall of 2021, and stretches over the next four months. Once Russia invades Ukraine, the already narrowing aperture through which its subjects were able to broadcast the truth irises closed completely.
There’s an unreasonable yet difficult to resist impulse when reading history, to think when to flee should be self-evident, that it should be obvious when a situation has taken a turn from the bad toward the terrible. Loktev’s film is a stunningly stressful experience in what it’s like to actually decide when the desire to stay and fight should give way to the need to cut and run. As one of the journalists — some of them queer, all of them young and progressive and devoted to their calling — notes to a friend, totalitarianism doesn’t actually manifest as the active oppression of all citizens. It can feel like normalcy, aside from the targeting of all those deemed undesirable as a way of keeping everyone else in line. How do you know you’re the frog in the pot in the apocryphal experiment? When Loktev, who was born in the USSR but who grew up in the US, starts filming in October 2021, the friend who is her entrypoint into the scene she’s documenting is feeling the heat turn up another increment. Anna Nemzer, a whippet-thin woman with a black bob and a face that resembles Jodie Comer’s, is one of the anchors at Rain, hosting a show in which she talks to activists and dissidents about their work and what, in the country, needs to change. And Rain has just been slapped with the label of “foreign agent,” putting her among the outlets and individuals on a government list whose newest additions are announced every Friday.
Everyone with foreign agent status has to include and be introduced with a disclaimer about how they’re getting funded by outside sources, an absurdity that Rain leans into by staging a marathon of interviews with other foreign agents, some whose record with the status goes back decades. Every one of them requires the extra clause in their introduction. The humor and camaraderie can only carry the situation so far, though, because as Anna notes, the designation is a means for the government to fine Rain into oblivion if they choose. Rain is a lively workplace in, as Anna puts it, a “hipster place” with graffitied walls and musical guests, but the precarity of the operation and of the safety of the people who pass through it is always evident. Some of them deal with having their time chipped away by weaponized bureaucracy like the foreign agent list, while others have already dealt with having their homes and offices raided (the preferred time for that is apparently in the early morning) and being detained. Loktev makes her way into various apartments for commiserative gatherings and holiday celebrations — the midpoint of My Undesirable Friends is a delirious New Year’s party — where her hosts inevitably mention that their places are certainly bugged. The idea that the end is coming soon, that Rain will be shut down, and maybe the internet as well, is frequently brought up — and yet, when in January and February, the country starts abruptly accelerating toward war, the reality of how grim things are about to get still comes as a shock.
My Undesirable Friends is the first film that Loktev has made in 14 years, though that’s not for a lack of trying. Her previous film, 2011’s The Loneliest Planet, was an incisive drama about a couple of experienced backpackers who have a scary encounter in the Caucasus Mountains that opens up a rift in their relationship. My Undesirable Friends is nonfiction, and sprawls while The Loneliest Planet is perfectly spare, and yet they have something in common — that moment when your sense of safety ruptures. The first chapters of My Undesirable Friends unfold over weeks, while the last two take place over just a few days each, as preparations for the invasion begin, and with it comes a crackdown on media just as information about what’s happening is needed most. Loktev’s made an invaluable document about what it’s like to be one of the remaining voices of dissent in a country that has finally decided to seize control of the narrative and leave only propaganda remaining. But she’s also created a heartbreaking human drama about the costs of doing this work, and what it means to be prepared to lose everything for it. My Undesirable Friends begins with Anna, but by the final chapter, its focus has drifted to Ksyusha, a painful young Rain employee whose reporter fiancee, Ivan, has been imprisoned for over a year. Ksyusha loves Harry Potter, and baking, and doesn’t want to abandon Ivan, even as it becomes clear that staying isn’t an option. In her anguished face, captured in tearful close up as the world crumbles around her, are all the other reasons why leaving your home behind isn’t simple — even if you don’t recognize that home anymore.
