Latest news with #JuliaLoktev
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Kept fighting despite the odds': the Russian journalists who risked everything to report the truth
In the fall of 2021, the director Julia Loktev traveled from her Brooklyn home to Moscow, with the intent to film some friends under pressure. That summer, the Russian government had cracked down on the remaining independent media in the country, designating outlets and journalists it found irksome as 'foreign agents'. Loktev, who moved to the US from the Soviet Union at age nine, had several journalist friends now required to submit detailed financial reports to the government and affix an all-caps disclaimer to any output, be it an article or an Instagram post of their cat, declaring it the work of a foreign agent. Loktev began shadowing her friend Anna Nemzer, a host on the country's only remaining independent news channel, TV Rain (Dozhd, in Russian), which was on the growing list of 'foreign agents' meant to chill any press critical of Vladimir Putin's regime. She was particularly interested in Sonya Groysman and Olga Churakova, two female journalists in their 20s who, with youthful gusto, started the podcast Hi, You're a Foreign Agent to document how their new notoriety affected their lives. 'I thought I was making a film about these young journalists who were dealing with this. I thought it was going to be called The Lives of Foreign Agents,' Loktev recalled recently. 'I thought I was making a film about people trying to figure out how you live in a country where you oppose the government. How long can you keep working? How do you keep fighting when you live under a regime you oppose?' Instead, Loktev's film, My Undesirable Friends: Part One – Last Air in Moscow, became a record of Russian independent media's last gasps under Putin, a time capsule of a world that no longer exists. Loktev tells us so in the opening minutes of this astonishing five-hour film (now playing in theaters, with a break between chapters 1-3 and 4-5): 'The world you are about to see no longer exists,' she says over footage of bright storefronts in Moscow. 'None of us knew what was about to happen.' In February 2022, four months after Loktev started filming, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a shock even to the clear-eyed journalists who had reported on Putin's mobilization of troops in the days and weeks prior. Within a week, much of the country's civil society and independent press fled. The first chapter of My Undesirable Friends, filmed in October 2021, ends with a chilling note: every person you just saw now lives in exile. Much of My Undesirable Friends thus plays out like a thriller, with characters trying to figure out their next move with what we know to be limited time. On some level, they know it, too, even if they do not yet believe it. 'A year from now, we'll remember October 2021 as Eden,' Groysman tells Loktev in the first chapter. 'In a year, half your characters won't be in Russia, and someone will certainly end up in jail.' Most of the independent journalists Loktev followed are young women just old enough to remember a time when Russian society was freer, and are loth to let it go without a fight. At one point, Groysman shows the camera a bunch of magazines that she kept from 2012, her senior year of high school, that support LGBTQ+ rights or bolster the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny or encourage dissent, all unimaginable a decade later. Groysman and Churakova form part of a tight core of journalists, across a handful of remaining outlets, who anchor the film with disarming warmth and humor; in one scene, as Loktev films Groysman folding laundry at her unsettled Moscow apartment, the latter jokingly chastises: 'An American journalist is digging through Russian dirty laundry!' The two podcast hosts overlap with Ksenia Mironova, a fellow journalist whose fiance, Ivan Safronov, was indefinitely jailed on trumped-up charges after he investigated Russian defense contracts. (Safronov was sentenced to 22 years in prison in September 2022, a sham verdict meant to threaten journalists.) Mironova calmly recounts how the authorities upended their apartment in the raid that took Safronov away – a terrifying possibility within a dark range of common intimidation tactics. 'Some of our characters have been searched, some of their places were bugged,' said Loktev. 'They were constantly afraid of when they would have to leave, or when they would have to stop working or worse, when they would be arrested.' Nevertheless, they keep working. Mironova keeps reporting, even as she breaks when sending care packages to Safronov that will almost certainly never reach him. So do Irina Dolinina and Alesya Marokhovskaya, even after their studio is bugged and they lose their rare trial contesting the foreign agents label. So does Elena Kostyuchenko, an exceptionally daring reporter for the storied investigative outlet Novaya Gazeta, even after several of her colleagues have been killed; at the outset of the invasion, she manages to slip into Ukraine. So does Nemzer, the host of a short-lived TV Rain program called Who's Got the Power? on civil society leaders, even as the noose tightens on free speech in the country. Just before going on air with her university thesis adviser to talk about the detention of her parents' friend, an academic also designated a 'foreign agent', Nemzer reflects on the surreality of the collapse in real time: 'It's this constant attempt, on one hand, not to panic or become hysterical – everything is OK, everything is OK. On the other hand, you can't allow yourself to get used to this.' Again and again, each journalist tries to articulate the strange cognitive dissonance of life going on as the society you knew crumbles. There are several scenes of warm camaraderie – birthday parties, group dinners, New Year's wishes for a better year in 2022 that now feel haunted. Frank conversation of daunting opposition and unbelievable risks are mixed with references to Harry Potter – Putin makes an easy comparison to Voldemort – and Instagram trends. What is an acute crisis to independent journalists seems minor to many other Russians – Michelin-star restaurants open in Moscow, cafes are full. Several have relatives who are not as critical of the regime; Marokhovskaya must hide her girlfriend from her conservative family. As a sociologist tells Groysman: 'This feeling that we're in a state of war, and everyone around us is not, is typical for totalitarian regimes.' It is hard, as an American writer, not to see reflections in the current US administration, which has made moves strikingly, chillingly similar to Putin. 'When I was making this, it felt like something that happens over there,' said Loktev. 'And just in the last six months, it's startling how many things in the film are being echoed here.' Journalists kicked out of the presidential press pool in favor of uncritical sycophants. Universities cowed and sanctioned. The firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief over unflattering data, the erasure of Trump's impeachments from the Smithsonian, the purging of the Kennedy Center board – all mirror actions taken by the Putin regime. 'We're experiencing something we have not experienced before, and we don't know how to deal with it,' said Loktev of the US. 'We go outside, there's nice cafes, life looks normal. And meanwhile, men in hooded masks are snatching people into unmarked vans.' The dissonance coursing through Loktev's film – so much calm, amid so much catastrophe – is 'how life looks when this happens. That is how life looks under an authoritarian regime. It's just not how we imagine it.' For Loktev's subjects, life and work are inextricable; both cratered abruptly after the state shut down TV Rain and other outlets, threatening criminal penalties. As captured in the final chapter, most fled that night, hopping on the next available flight – to Istanbul, to Tbilisi, to Mongolia – with whatever they could pack in two hours. Loktev stayed one extra day, to make sure her footage uploaded to the cloud, in case her drives were confiscated. She is at work on Part Two, titled Exile, which picks up two days after the mass exodus, as her subjects continue to work from the US and Europe, trying to report honestly on Russia for Russian audiences. In the third chapter, in late December 2021, Nemzer acknowledges how futile that task could be, even before the disastrous invasion. In a commemorative year-end video for TV Rain, she recalls a year spent asking human rights activists why they keep working when they're persecuted; asking lawyers why they keep going to court when it's rigged; asking journalists why they keep investigating when exposure changes nothing. The answer, always, was to create a record of truth. 'Sometimes I ask myself, 'God, what am I doing?'' she says. 'I have one answer. If all these people are creating a record, then I'm going to try too.' My Undesirable Friends stands as its own staggering record, of people 'who kept fighting despite the odds, who were continuing to speak the truth', said Loktev. 'They kept doing this even as they were named foreign agents, even as they risked arrest. They just kept doing it.' My Undesirable Friends will show at Film Forum in New York City from 15 August with a UK date to be announced This article was amended on 15 August 2025. A previous version erroneously stated that Ivan Safronov was sentenced to 24 years in prison. He was sentenced to 22 years.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘This Is What It Looks Like to Live Under Authoritarianism'
Filmmaker Julia Loktev's voice is the first we hear in her epic new documentary. Over a nighttime shot of Moscow, she warns, 'The world you're about to see no longer exists. None of us knew what was about to happen.' For the next five-and-a-half hours, My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow more than lives up to that ominous opening. Loktev's film chronicles the Russian government's systematic crackdown on journalists in late 2021 and early 2022 as Vladimir Putin plots his invasion of Ukraine. Shooting by herself with just an iPhone, Loktev spent weeks at a time shadowing the young women and men of TV Rain, the country's last independent news channel. The result is a gripping vérité portrait of citizens under siege by a tyrannical leader stripping away their freedoms. But since its international premiere at last year's New York Film Festival, My Undesirable Friends (which makes its U.S. theatrical debut in New York City's Film Forum on Friday) has become much more than a movie about Russia. Speaking over Zoom from New York, Loktev (who grew up in Russia before moving to the States when she was nine) is still absorbing her documentary's wide-reaching political implications — and how the film is sounding an alarm bell for what's taking place in America under Trump. More from Rolling Stone Trump's Sloppy Effort to Distract From Epstein Mess Creates a 'Ticking Time Bomb' Behind the Scenes of 'Trophy Wife: Murder on Safari' She Disappeared From a Cruise Ship 27 Years Ago. Could She Still Be Alive? 'My roommates from Iran, friends who grew up under the dictatorship in Argentina, people from China — they all said, 'This is about us,'' Loktev says. ''This is what it feels like to live under an authoritarian regime. We'd never seen anything that shows it so well.' And now, Americans are going, 'Oh, it's about us.'' The 55-year-old filmmaker had not planned on making such a sweeping yet intimate portrait when she first reached out to her friend, TV Rain host Anna Nemzer. The initial spark was an August 2021 New York Times piece about young Russian independent journalists being labeled 'foreign agents' by Putin's regime, which demanded they run a ridiculously long disclaimer before their segments identifying themselves as such. 'The important part was that [the journalists] were fighting back with humor,' Loktev recalls. For example, some of those reporters responded by launching a snarky podcast called Hi, You're a Foreign Agent. 'That's when I contacted Anna Nemzer and said, 'Let's do something about this.'' Starting in October of that year, Loktev began filming Nemzer and her colleagues, who felt the weight of Putin's restrictive rule but had no sense that the war on Ukraine was imminent. 'The impending doom was definitely there from the start,' says Loktev, 'but the doom that people expected [was] different than the doom that happened. They thought that what awaited them was an internal crackdown aimed at them. They were all trying to figure out, 'How long can we keep working as journalists here?' They kept saying they love [Russia] more than Putin loves it and they keep trying to fight inside the country.' Although Loktev directed the 1998 documentary Moment of Impact, she most recently made the feature films Day Night Day Night (starring Luisa Williams as a suicide bomber) and The Loneliest Planet (with Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg playing lovers on a fateful backpacking trip). And while My Undesirable Friends is a real-life drama, it unspools like a paranoid thriller, so Loktev approached it with a narrative flair. 'People describe it as very different things,' she says, from a horror film to a reality show to a Russian novel to a dark comedy. 'I think it's all of those things. What it's not is a conventional documentary.' The film eschews dry talking-head interviews from political experts, instead presenting fly-on-the-wall encounters with these independent journalists — many of them women in their twenties — as they do their jobs and then blow off steam during their off hours. As Loktev describes it, 'There is a tension that builds, but meanwhile, you're with these people who are hanging out. They're quite funny as horrible, horrible things are happening to them.' Unfolding over five chapters — three set before the Ukraine invasion, two in the midst of it — My Undesirable Friends details Putin's chilling effect on Loktev's subjects, and different individuals become the main character across the movie's runtime, including journalist Ksenia Mironova, a sweet but dogged reporter whose fiancé, fellow journalist Ivan Safronov, has been imprisoned. TV Rain covers massive protests in the wake of the 2021 incarceration of anti-Putin activist Alexei Navalny, which seem to suggest a sea change within the country — only to have the government crush dissent. The movie has the suffocating feel of a hand tightening around a throat as these women keep reporting while simultaneously worrying if they should flee Russia to avoid arrest, their anxiety captured nearly in real time. Inevitably, Americans will notice disturbing similarities between Putin and Trump, who has repeatedly threatened the press, challenged democratic norms, and ordered numerous detainments. Loktev, who is nearing completion of a second five-hour documentary that details what became of the exiled journalists, understands why American viewers will watch her film looking for clues to what might happen here. 'We are so hungry for things that help us understand the current moment,' she says. 'Part of living under an authoritarian [government] is it does make you feel like you're going crazy — it doesn't make sense. [Watching the movie] is a way of understanding, 'Everything you're feeling is normal under these circumstances.'' Because she stayed close to the ground, documenting this pivotal political moment from the perspective of the journalists she followed, My Undesirable Friends is a powerfully emotional experience. And by cataloging everyday life under authoritarianism, she exposes the crushing normalcy that's never depicted in Hollywood portrayals of dystopian governments. '[TV Rain reporter] Sonya [Groysman] interviews this anthropologist: 'It's a strange feeling because there's nice cafes everywhere and Moscow looks great and you can get anything delivered. Meanwhile, my friends are being arrested.' And the anthropologist explains to her that we're used to seeing films like V for Vendetta, which make it look like, in an authoritarian society, everyone suffers equally and everyone's miserable,' Loktev says. 'But actually this is what it looks like to live under authoritarianism — it looks really nice for a lot of people, and there are matcha lattes everywhere. I think about this every day now that I walk out in New York. My neighborhood looks really nice — meanwhile, there are people in unmarked vans with masks snatching people off the street.' As frightening as the world around Loktev's subjects is, what's remarkable is how full of life they are, the filmmaker emphasizing their youthful energy, dark sense of humor, and endearing obsessions. (A running subplot is Mironova's love for Harry Potter, culminating in her meeting Draco Malfoy himself, Tom Felton.) But Loktev is quick to correct anyone who perceives My Undesirable Friends as a snapshot of idealists under duress. 'You can't really be idealistic in 2021 Russia,' she counters. 'Navalny has already been poisoned. There's been huge crackdowns by the police. People that go to protests get beaten with batons. It's not idealism, that's not the right word. It's a persistence despite the odds.' Loktev points to TV Rain's 2021 New Year's Eve broadcast, which plays out during one chapter of My Undesirable Friends. It's a defiantly celebratory evening, despite the journalists' fear that they could end up in prison soon. 'The title of the New Year's show is We're Not Dispersing. That's incredibly inspiring because it's not idealism at all — it's a necessity to keep going.' If My Undesirable Friends were merely a close accounting of Russia's dismantling of a free society, it would be stunning enough. But by positioning this as a story of a younger generation refusing to cede their liberties to tyrants, Loktev has made a film about resistance, putting a human face on the daily struggles concerned citizens must endure to take back their country. For her, the film's message can be defined by one incident. 'It was the closing of Memorial, Russia's oldest human rights organization, dedicated to preserving the memory of political terror going back to Stalin and also looking at political prisoners today,' Loktev recalls. 'Right before New Year's Eve, Russia shut it down for ridiculous [reasons]. The way that Memorial dealt with being shut down is they had a holiday party that night. And this human rights lawyer stood up and said, 'Let joy and laughter also be a part of our resistance.' 'I think [it's] incredibly important not to become dispirited,' Loktev continues. 'That's what you see in the film. I always say, for a film about political repression in a very cold place, it's strangely funny and warm. Life and warmth and laughter is also a form of resistance — that's what keeps you from giving up.' Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Best 'Saturday Night Live' Characters of All Time Denzel Washington's Movies Ranked, From Worst to Best 70 Greatest Comedies of the 21st Century Solve the daily Crossword
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Kept fighting despite the odds': the Russian journalists who risked everything to report the truth
In the fall of 2021, the director Julia Loktev traveled from her Brooklyn home to Moscow, with the intent to film some friends under pressure. That summer, the Russian government had cracked down on the remaining independent media in the country, designating outlets and journalists it found irksome as 'foreign agents'. Loktev, who moved to the US from the Soviet Union at age nine, had several journalist friends now required to submit detailed financial reports to the government and affix an all-caps disclaimer to any output, be it an article or an Instagram post of their cat, declaring it the work of a foreign agent. Loktev began shadowing her friend Anna Nemzer, a host on the country's only remaining independent news channel, TV Rain (Dozhd, in Russian), which was on the growing list of 'foreign agents' meant to chill any press critical of Vladimir Putin's regime. She was particularly interested in Sonya Groysman and Olga Churakova, two female journalists in their 20s who, with youthful gusto, started the podcast Hi, you're a foreign agent to document how their new notoriety impacted their lives. 'I thought I was making a film about these young journalists who were dealing with this. I thought it was going to be called 'The Lives of Foreign Agents,'' Loktev recalled recently. 'I thought I was making a film about people trying to figure out how you live in a country where you oppose the government. How long can you keep working? How do you keep fighting when you live under a regime you oppose?' Instead, Loktev's film, My Undesirable Friends: Part One — Last Air in Moscow, became a record of Russian independent media's last gasps under Putin, a time capsule of a world that no longer exists. Loktev tells us so in the opening minutes of this astonishing five-hour film (now playing in theaters, with a break between chapters 1-3 and 4-5): 'The world you are about to see no longer exists,' she says over footage of bright storefronts in Moscow. 'None of us knew what was about to happen.' In February 2022, four months after Loktev started filming, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a shock even to the clear-eyed journalists who had reported on Putin's mobilization of troops in the days and weeks prior. Within a week, much of the country's civil society and independent press fled. The first chapter of My Undesirable Friends, filmed in October 2021, ends with a chilling note: every person you just saw now lives in exile. Much of My Undesirable Friends thus plays out like a thriller, with characters trying to figure out their next move with what we know to be limited time. On some level, they know it, too, even if they do not yet believe it. 'A year from now, we'll remember October 2021 as Eden,' Groysman tells Loktev in the first chapter. 'In a year, half your characters won't be in Russia, and someone will certainly end up in jail.' Most of the independent journalists Loktev followed are young women just old enough to remember a time when Russian society was freer, and are loathe to let it go without a fight. At one point, Groysman shows the camera a bunch of magazines that she kept from 2012, her senior year of high school, that support LGBTQ+ rights or bolster the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny or encourage dissent, all unimaginable a decade later. Groysman and Churakova form part of a tight core of journalists, across a handful of remaining outlets, who anchor the film with disarming warmth and humor; in one scene, as Loktev films Groysman folding laundry at her unsettled Moscow apartment, the latter jokingly chastises: 'An American journalist is digging through Russian dirty laundry!' The two podcast hosts overlap with Ksenia Mironova, a fellow journalist whose fiance, Ivan Safronov, was indefinitely jailed on trumped-up charges after he investigated Russian defense contracts. (Safronov was sentenced to 24 years in prison in September 2022, a sham verdict meant to threaten journalists.) Mironova calmly recounts how the authorities upended their apartment in the raid that took Safronov away – a terrifying possibility within a dark range of common intimidation tactics. 'All of our characters have been searched, some of their places were bugged,' said Loktev. 'They were constantly afraid of when they would have to leave, or when they would have to stop working or worse, when they would be arrested.' Nevertheless, they keep working. Mironova keeps reporting, even as she breaks when sending care packages to Safronov that will almost certainly never reach him. So do Irina Dolinina and Alesya Marokhovskaya, even after their studio is bugged and they lose their rare trial contesting the foreign agents label. So does Elena Kostyuchenko, an exceptionally daring reporter for the storied investigative outlet Novaya Gazeta, even after several of her colleagues have been killed; at the outset of the invasion, she manages to slip into Ukraine. So does Nemzer, the host of a short-lived TV Rain program called 'Who's Got the Power?' on civil society leaders, even as the noose tightens on free speech in the country. Just before going on air with her university thesis advisor to talk about the detention of her parents' friend, an academic also designated a 'foreign agent', Nemzer reflects on the surreality of the collapse in real time: 'It's this constant attempt, on one hand, not to panic or become hysterical – everything is OK, everything is OK. On the other hand, you can't allow yourself to get used to this.' Again and again, each journalist tries to articulate the strange cognitive dissonance of life going on as the society you knew crumbles. There are several scenes of warm camaraderie – birthday parties, group dinners, New Year's wishes for a better year in 2022 that now feel haunted. Frank conversation of daunting opposition and unbelievable risks are mixed with references to Harry Potter – Putin makes an easy comparison to Voldemort – and Instagram trends. What is an acute crisis to independent journalists seems minor to many other Russians – Michelin-star restaurants open in Moscow, cafes are full. Several have relatives who are not as critical of the regime; Marokhovskaya must hide her girlfriend from her conservative family. As a sociologist tells Groysman: 'This feeling that we're in a state of war, and everyone around us is not, is typical for totalitarian regimes.' It is hard, as an American writer, not to see reflections in the current US administration, which has made moves strikingly, chillingly similar to Putin. 'When I was making this, it felt like something that happens over there,' said Loktev. 'And just in the last six months, it's startling how many things in the film are being echoed here.' Journalists kicked out of the presidential press pool in favor of uncritical sycophants. Universities cowed and sanctioned. The firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief over unflattering data, the erasure of Trump's impeachments from the Smithsonian, the purging of the Kennedy Center board – all mirror actions taken by the Putin regime. 'We're experiencing something we have not experienced before, and we don't know how to deal with it,' said Loktev of the US. 'We go outside, there's nice cafes, life looks normal. And meanwhile, men in hooded masks are snatching people into unmarked vans.' The dissonance coursing through Loktev's film – so much calm, amid so much catastrophe – is 'how life looks when this happens. That is how life looks under an authoritarian regime. It's just not how we imagine it.' For Loktev's subjects, life and work are inextricable; both cratered abruptly after the state shut down TV Rain and other outlets, threatening criminal penalties. As captured in the final chapter, most fled that night, hopping on the next available flight – to Istanbul, to Tbilisi, to Mongolia – with whatever they could pack in two hours. Loktev stayed one extra day, to make sure her footage uploaded to the cloud, in case her drives were confiscated. She is at work on Part Two, titled Exile, which picks up two days after the mass exodus, as her subjects continue to work from the US and Europe, trying to report honestly on Russia for Russian audiences. In the third chapter, in late December 2021, Nemzer acknowledges how futile that task could be, even before the disastrous invasion. In a commemorative year-end video for TV Rain, she recalls a year spent asking human rights activists why they keep working when they're persecuted; asking lawyers why they keep going to court when it's rigged; asking journalists why they keep investigating when exposure changes nothing. The answer, always, was to create a record of truth. 'Sometimes I ask myself, 'God, what am I doing?'' she says. 'I have one answer. If all these people are creating a record, then I'm going to try too.' My Undesirable Friends stands as its own staggering record, of people 'who kept fighting despite the odds, who were continuing to speak the truth,' said Loktev. 'They kept doing this even as they were named foreign agents, even as they risked arrest. They just kept doing it.' My Undesirable Friends will show at Film Forum in New York City from 15 August with a UK date to be announced
New York Times
5 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
‘My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow' Review: Strangling Democracy
We're on a street in a cosmopolitan city, cars whizzing by. A woman's voice calmly addresses us. 'The world you are about to see no longer exists,' she says. 'None of us knew what was about to happen.' That is Julia Loktev's voice. It's October 2021, and she has arrived in Moscow to make a film about two young Russian journalists, Sonya Groysman and Olga Churakova, after reading an article in The New York Times about their podcast 'Hello, You Are a Foreign Agent.' They've been put on the a list of 'foreign agents' by the Russian Ministry of Justice, which means they have to register every personal expenditure with the government and append a disclaimer to everything they broadcast or publish — even personal Instagram posts — or face fines, even jail time. Their only infraction, so to speak, is not reporting the news in the manner that the Russian government would prefer. Loktev, who was born in St. Petersburg and immigrated to the United States when she was 9, thought this might make for a good documentary. History tells us that labeling independent journalists as adversaries of their own country tends not to end there. So with the help of her friend Anna Nemzer, a journalist at the then-Moscow-based independent news station TV Rain, she befriended a number of other journalists in the city. Most were in their 20s; most were women; most worked at TV Rain. Loktev went to Moscow and started filming. What none of them knew — what none of them could have possibly known — was that within four months, Russia would launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That has had many horrendous consequences, and one is that it provides a useful pretext for the near-total shutdown of Russian independent media; journalists could now be labeled 'internal enemies' for reporting on the war in terms counter to the government's narrative. Almost all of these journalists would flee the country, fearing prison or worse. And Loktev's film would evolve into a shattering portrayal of an authoritarian government using misinformation, isolation and war to control its citizens. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
22-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow' Review: An Intimate Documentary Epic About Journalists at War
At nearly five-and-a-half hours — further divided into five massive chapters — Julia Loktev's 'My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow' is less like typical docu-journalism, and more akin to Tolstoy's 'War and Peace.' The first volume in a two-part series about independent reporters, it lays out its twists and turns early on: At some point during its runtime, Russia will launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Capturing this war and its consequences was never Loktev's intent, but the film's evolution (both as a narrative, and as a DIY production) is a vital part of its text. What began as a piece about Loktev's friends and colleagues being branded 'foreign agents' by the Russian state evolves in real time. It's even forced to switch protagonists at one point, owing the mounting logistical challenges caused by the ongoing conflict. While Loktev intended to work with a professional cinematographer, she would end up shooting much of the movie up close on her outdated iPhone X, yielding stark, realistic hues and a surprising intimacy seldom seen in political documentaries. More from Variety 'What Does That Nature Say to You' Review: Hong Sangsoo Takes a Blurry Lens to Early Adulthood 'The Message' Review: An Uneventful Drama About a Young Pet Medium 'Tiger's Pond' Review: A Restrained Indian Political Drama Set on the Edge of Spirituality One question will no doubt be on most viewers' minds: Can a doc like this sustain one's interest for 324 minutes, even with an intermission? The answer is a resounding 'Yes, and then some,' owing to the lengthy, casual foundation the film lays during its first three chapters (each running about an hour, give or take) using conversation snippets, news footage and even its subjects' typed reports appearing as on-screen text. The Soviet-born American Loktev is a relative outsider, but her window (and ours) into the Moscow journalism scene is Ann Nemzer, a conscientious mother trying to do the right thing in the face of Russia's oppressive regime, and Loktev's co-director on the project. Nemzer works for the independent journalistic outlet TV Rain, where the talk show 'Who's Got The Power?' focuses on activists seeking to make positive changes in Russian politics. However, new laws have forced channels like Rain (and each of their journalists) to declare themselves 'foreign agents' in lengthy disclaimers, which the film's subjects hilariously repurpose. To watch 'My Undesirable Friends: Part I' is to live alongside its characters, and to quickly grow accustomed to not only their newsroom hustle and bustle, but their colloquialisms and pop culture touchstones. Whether or not you come away from the film speaking fluent Russian, there's a non-zero chance you'll be tempted to pronounce 'Harry Potter' the Russian way ('Garry Potter'), given how frequently the fantasy series is used as a point of comparison for Russia's fascist backslide. Drawing these connections may be passé and outdated to some, but here, they fuel the movie's conversational momentum, leaving as quickly as they arrive in order to make room for relevant details about the who's who (and why) of Russian power, as the movie's on-screen text emphasizes a countdown to things going belly-up, made all the more ominous by the subtle death knolls of Sami Buccella's scant but haunting score. Loktev, who edited the film alongside Michael Taylor, knows silence is a vital dramatic commodity, so she uses it judiciously. However, the constant chatter somehow never grows repetitive, whether it involves journalists casually discussing their families and secret same-sex partners, or engaging in conversations about the mechanics they're sure to face should they step even a toe out of line. Perhaps it's because Loktev is presented with a vast ensemble from which to choose, but just as likely a reason is the basic reality in which these people live, one where new norms are shattered each day, and 'normality' involves balancing the jovial, the banal and the dire all at once, over dinner and drinks. These dimensions are detailed and endearing, ensuring each new exposition dump is imbued with dynamic, multifaceted humanity. A second film, titled 'My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile' has already been shot, and is due later this year. In the meantime, 'Part I' is as much about shifting political sands as it is the confluence of journalism and community in the face of mounting legal hurdles and encroaching authoritarianism. All these facets are forced into violent collision when the February 2022 invasion rolls around, turning the subjects' lives (and in the process, the documentary itself) upside down. Three hours in, its focus is forced to shift to a novice journalist, Ksenia Mironova (though it retains most of its original supporting 'cast'), whose partner is a prisoner of the state, and who's soon faced with the reality of having to leave Russia once Putin's hammer comes down on anyone reporting on the war. The journalists' camaraderie takes center stage in the film's second half, which builds to stunning climactic moments of the 'I can't quite believe this was captured on camera' variety. Loktev's immersion in the action provides a pulse-pounding quality when things come crumbling down, resulting in an intimate, enormous, urgent political portrait of speaking truth to power, and speaking it together. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
