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Early on in My Undesirable Friends, filmmaker Julia Loktev’s monumental and marathon-length chronicle of Russian journalists attempting to practice their trade in Putin‘s Russia, an interview subject is asked about totalitarian regimes. If you look at how such governments are portrayed in movies, the person notes, the idea is that everybody is noticeably suffocating as collective boot heels press down on their throats. That’s not how it tends to work in the real world, however. There’s an illusion of everything being perfectly fine on the surface, that life goes on as it always has for most of the population. Read the diary of someone from 1937, she notes, and they will tell you that the trains run on time, women’s rights are being protected under Stalin, the Golden Age is in full swing. Meanwhile, what will eventually be known as “the Great Purge” is taking place on the periphery.
This is what it is like in Moscow circa October 2021, the interviewee declares. You have cafes filled with chattering young people, and beautiful parks, and can have food delivered to your doorstep 24 hours a day. And yet, somewhere in the city, someone is being arrested and detained as an enemy of the state under dodgy pretenses. “The feeling that we are in a state of war and everyone else is not,” she notes, is typical under such regimes. Such cognitive dissonance is the new normal. The crabs go about their day to day existence. And then some notice that the water starts to seem just a little bit hotter… .
A five-and-a-half hour portrait of what happens when the concept of a free press turns into a contradiction in terms, My Undesirable Friends follows a handful of female reporters who are trying to counteract the propaganda machine of their home country — and it will look extremely familiar to many folks who currently feel like they’re in a state of war while life goes on all around them. Born in Russia and based in Brooklyn, Loktev initially went to Moscow in the fall of 2021 to do research for a potential project. She’d read an article in the New York Times about a generation of muckrakers who were standing up against the state via independent organizations and DIY podcasts like Hi, You’re a Foreign Agent (the blanket term given to anyone in the media who doesn’t toe the party line), and wanted to know more. She reached out to an old friend, Anya Nezmer, who worked for an online network called TV Rain and had been calling Putin out for years. Nezmer would facilitate introductions. She would also serve as the doc’s resident voice of experience, whose timber would get wearier over time.
The film follows Anya, the podcasters Sonya Groysman and Olga Churakova, online reporter Alesya Marokhovskaya, and several other members of a fourth-estate sorority considered to be a fifth column by the corrupt powers that be, with Lotkev tagging along as they try to get their message heard. Sometimes, they are joyous, bantering with coworkers in the start-up–style offices and telling stories at dinner parties. Other times, they wryly trade tips about avoiding arrest or what kind of underwear is best suited for surprise, early-morning interrogations conducted by cops pounding on doors. (Functional, not too fancy, not too plain.) One subject, Ksenia Mironova, is barred from visiting her fiancé in prison, a fellow journalist who’s facing a long sentence for reasons that remain murky. Another, Irina Dolinina, chides her mom for worrying about her at protests.
Deserved handwringing is a constant, but so is dark humor. The fact that even the most innocuous videos they post must be accompanied by a message declaring that it’s the product of media supposedly being funded and communicated by foreign powers is a running joke. The kind of joke where the laughter is bitter and sticks in your throat, but still.
One of the benefits of Loktev letting her film leisurely unfurl over five separate but equally compelling hour-plus chapters is that you really get to know each of these women, experience the bond they have, bask in their personalities, and share their troubles. Taken out of context, My Undesirable Friends could be mistake for a hang-out ensemble movie, or a typical docuseries following around a disparate group of urbanites as they fight the good fight and figure themselves out over several months. Except the menace behind all of the exchanges involving a slow death by a thousand executive-order cuts, or how surveillance and harassment is a daily occurrence, or the manner of doublespeak used to tarnish them as both journalists and citizens, is ever-present. So is the ticking clock of history. The incredible grace under pressure each of these “average” yet extraordinary women, all of whom are passionate and dedicated to what they do, is already being tested to the limit as 2021 draws to a close. In a few months, they will run headfirst into a seismic tipping point.
Putin would not be the first national figurehead to use war as an excuse to sideline (or do far worse) those who he considers unfriendly journalists, nor while he likely be the last. But you’ll notice that the full title of Loktev’s extended verité paean to these heroes is My Undesirable Friends — Part 1: Last Air in Moscow. That subtitle is not just prophetic, it’s well-earned. By the time war is declared on Ukraine in February of 2022, every one of her subjects’ outlets will be shut down, and every one of them will leave Moscow in fear. A disclaimer at the end of the first installment tells you this upfront, and Loktev is working on a Part 2 that will pick up the rest of their stories in exile. But you spend the proceeding four chapters fully knowing what awaits them. Even before the filmmaker’s cameras catch the exact moment that Rain employees are told that special forces are showing up to take them into custody and they flee in panic, the sense of instability and dread is palpable. Life during wartime will make what came before seem positively calm. At one point, Anya jokes that October 2021 will seem like paradise to them a few years down the road. The only thing she got wrong was the timing.
Speaking of which: When Loktev premiered her must-see magnum opus at the New York Film Festival this past October, the U.S. was a very different place than it is now. As the film begins its theatrical run at Film Forum in NYC — a run which, one hopes, is just the beginning for a long jaunt in theaters throughout the country, and sets up a stay on a streaming services that make it available to as many eyeballs as humanly possible — a lot of us feel like we are in state of war while everyone else is not. Regardless of political situations, this initial batch of My Undesirable Friends‘ dispatches from the frontlines would make for absolutely magnificent and undeniably moving viewing. It’s one of the best films of the year, full stop. But now it’s both invaluable and something of a warning for many of us on the shape of things to come. It’s a state of the nation address that, unfortunately, is addressing a nation far beyond the borders of its subjects’ home.
