Life in Russia has changed a lot since the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and you’re unlikely to find a more direct or jarring study of that change than My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow. Director Julia Loktev’s documentary, which premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2024, follows journalists at TV Rain, Russia’s last independent news network, who are fighting to keep doing their jobs under the threat of war and the criminalization of free speech.
The film, which began streaming on Mubi in April—with a second part to follow this fall—can certainly be seen as a cautionary tale about societies that cease to value the freedom of journalistic expression, but it’s also a distinctly and vibrantly Russian story about what it means to perform the simple yet brave act of telling the truth amidst ever-increasing government repression.
Vogue recently spoke to Loktev about her last trip to Russia in 2022 and the political prisoners and émigrés who continue to give her hope.
Vogue: Can you tell me about the last time you were in Russia?
Julia Loktev: That was in 2022. TV Rain closed by the end of the first week of the full-scale war; Russia had shut down all independent media, and all the characters I was filming fled the country, so I had nobody left to film. I stayed until the last of my main characters left, and then I stayed one more day because I had footage from the closing of TV Rain and didn’t want to show up at immigration at the border with my hard drive. I had this incredible night of footage and couldn’t go straight to the airport with it, so I had to upload it over very slow hotel Wi-Fi.
One day later, I went to Istanbul, where some of the journalists I was filming had gone, and I continued traveling from country to country, filming them. I haven’t been back to Russia because I don’t have anyone to film there; one of the characters in the documentary considered returning and going to prison, but then she faced even worse threats. I had considered going back as well, but now my tourist visa has expired.
How personal did it feel for you to tell this story as a Russian-American filmmaker?
It felt extremely personal, in the sense that I had a strong connection with all of these characters, because we share the same native language and the same sense of place. I haven’t lived in Russia since I was a child, so I have this strange insider–outsider perspective: on the one hand, I speak nearly accentless Russian, but on the other, everything has to be explained to me because I left as a child. I can see it from an American perspective, but I can also feel it from the inside.
I think that’s exactly what allowed me to tell the story the way I did, in this super-intimate way. The people I’m filming are all journalists, but I’m not a journalist. I’m not a giver of information in my films; I’m a storyteller. I approached My Undesirable Friends the way I would a fiction film—in the sense that, instinctively, my impulse is to show people living their lives, to show them feeling their emotions in the settings where we actually live—at work, at home, on the way from work to home and back—and to film people in close-up, to capture faces the way you would actors’, except they’re going through something incredibly real.
The documentary does feel so cinematic, and I loved your choice to show people at home with their kids, which feels so familiar to my experience of contemporary Russian activism being really intergenerational.
Absolutely. Home is where people gather; they gather in each other’s kitchens, and there’s such a community of going to your friends’ houses and working together that spills into sitting around and talking together at night in a kitchen. I wanted to capture all the life around everything and give the sense of a place and a world that has disappeared or been dispersed in exile.
What surprised you most during the making of this film?
Well, there’s the big answer and then there’s the little answer. Obviously, all of us were shocked by the full-scale war. Russia had invaded Ukraine in 2014, and the war had been going on for almost eight years, but it was a level of war that, strangely, the world had gotten used to enough for Russia to host a World Cup in the meantime. The kind of war that Russia started on February 24, 2022—and that’s been going now for four unimaginable years—though… nobody could really believe that could happen. No matter how much people say it’s coming, it’s going to happen, you’re still in this state of absolute shock when it happens.
Up until that point, the film’s first chapter was going to be called The Lives of Foreign Agents, and until the moment when Russia started this horrific, criminal war in Ukraine, it was going to be a film about these journalists who’d been named foreign agents who were trying to figure out: How long can we keep working in our country? Is the time to leave tomorrow, or was it yesterday? How do we face all these crackdowns? How do we keep working and keep living?
And then everything changed when Russia invaded Ukraine, because they shut down all independent media, and all the journalists were asking themselves: How do we report for one more day? How do we report when they’re telling us we can’t call it a war? How do we report on Russians bombings apartment buildings, with the Ministry of Defense claiming that they’re not hitting any civilian targets, when you’re clearly showing that they are? All of them faced that decision of, like, do we go to the airport? Or do we go to work? The decision was clear: go to the airport, because if you stay and work another day, you might go to jail, and you won’t be useful as a journalist, so they all flood into exile.
Something that surprised me in a more surface-y way, though, was that in filming all these characters, you’d have this really serious moment, and all of a sudden someone would crack an inappropriate joke, and then you’d go back to the dramatic thing, and then you’d go back to another joke. These tonal shifts were incredibly eye-opening for me as a filmmaker, because I think we all do that in our everyday lives.
I’m thinking about a moment in the film where a journalist is showing off her photo of Anna Politkovskaya, and then she’s cracking jokes about smoking in the office.
It’s so Russian, but it’s also just very human. I mean, has there ever been a funeral without an inappropriate joke at some point? I think it’s really the texture of our lives; that’s how we deal with darkness. Most people know that from their own lives, but there’s a lot of humor in this film, and that was constantly surprising me.
Who are some Russian writers, thinkers, and/or artists who you wish were more widely known in the US and around the world?
My mind instinctively goes to people who are now political prisoners, like Zhenya Berkovich, a theater director and writer who’s now in prison in Russia. Ivan Safronov, a journalist, was the partner of one of our main characters, and is now serving 22 years in prison for so-called treason. There was a group of 18-year-old musicians called Stoptime that came out in St. Petersburg and sang songs by foreign agents and crowds of young people gathered around them. Of course, they were arrested repeatedly, and now they’ve had to flee the country, but then other musicians in other cities started playing those songs in the streets as well. When I think of who I’d like people to be aware of, it’s these people who continue to come out and try to protest in this incredibly dangerous, inhospitable environment, and still offer some sense of hope.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
