If Julia Loktev was going to be true to the experience of the intrepid journalists she followed in “My Undesirable Friends” as they continued to report on the diminishing level of personal freedoms in their native Russia as President Vladimir Putin began to brand many in the press as foreign agents to limit their activity even more, there would be no looking back. For the journalists, this meant wasting no time considering what might’ve been when the only option was to convey the danger of the present moment and for the filmmaker, there was no time for history lessons as a means of creating the proper context for audiences abroad, yet Loktev trusted what she was capturing to tell the whole story.
“I always compare it traveling somewhere, like let’s say if I went to Brazil and I had a Brazilian friend that had a lot of really smart Brazilian friends and I was hanging out with them,” says Loktev. “I’ve learned so much about what’s going on in Brazilian society, Brazilian history, Brazilian politics, just by hanging out and drinking with people, not in a way that is like someone lecturing you and explaining things to you, but just the way when you go somewhere, you learn so much about what that’s like. Of course, that history is always present, and that’s how you get things in the film — by osmosis, just by literally hanging out with these smart, funny people.”
It could be considered counterintuitive to approach the desperate situation in Russia, where thousands of journalists and hundreds of thousands of other citizens fled in the days leading up to the country’s invasion of Ukraine and in its aftermath as Putin began a crackdown on anyone not toeing the line, but to see the absurdity for what it is, Loktev finds a collection of female journalists who keep their perspective with black humor and continue to bring news to the public against all odds. Even as their outlets are under constant threat of being shut down, from the independent TV station Rain where Anna Nemzer has a talk show devoted to free speech advocates to the video channel Important Voices where Irina Dolinina and Alesya Marokhovskaya file reports, the women find a way to broadcast the reality of what’s going on in a country dominated by state-controlled media and by accompanying them, Loktev bears witness to history when the filmmaker’s interest in their rebellion predated the invasion of Ukraine, capturing in real time what it was like to live with the enormous pressure that any day could be your last in the country and the atmosphere of fear that is so rarely relayed by any other reportage out of Russia.
The film is exhilarating, which would be no small feat even if it weren’t a total of five hours long (divided into five individual segments and only half of what was filmed when Loktev is already at work on a second part), and besides its import as a historical record, “My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow” brings back one of cinema’s most exciting filmmakers in Loktev, who first made her mark channeling the free-floating anxiety in the air at the start of this century with the narrative features “Day Night Day Night” and “The Loneliest Planet.” It can seem as if she picked up just where she left off when the (very justifiable) feeling of paranoia pervades every frame of her first film in over a decade, but the film also speaks to a warmer side that will be familiar to anyone that’s engaged with her as she shows the camaraderie amongst the journalists around kitchen tables and on text chains as they strategize over their survival. An already urgent film is made all the more vital by the amount of life that Loktev and longtime editor Michael Taylor are able to show around the edges of the terrifying ordeal the journalists face.
After first premiering last fall at the New York Film Festival, “My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow” is returning to the city to start its theatrical run this week at Film Forum after its travels on the global festival circuit and Loktev generously took the time to talk about the impetus for traveling to Russia when so many were leaving, working on her first verite film (and her second doc after her debut feature “Moment of Impact,” drawing on her family’s personal history) and distilling a story with so many moving parts to its bare essence.
How did this come about?
There was a New York Times article in the late summer of ’21 about Russian journalists being named foreign agents — and this is the crucial part — fighting back with humor. That’s what hooked me. It had a photo of a couple of pretty cool looking girls in their mid-twenties, early-thirties. It looked like people I would know, except they’d been declared foreign agents and I thought, “This is kind of interesting.” Now, I was born in Russia in the Soviet Union, so I have a connection to the place and I speak Russian to my mom. But I thought something interesting is happening, so I called up a friend Anna Nemser, who was working at the last independent TV station in Russia, TV Rain, and who became a co-director on the film. I said, “Let’s make a film about this,” and we thought it was going to be a film called “The Lives of Foreign Agents,” about journalists who were being declared foreign agents at an incredible pace. Every Friday night, they put up the list like the high school musical cast being announced and everybody would be checking [to see] who was announced as a foreign agent. This is four-and-a-half months before Russia starts a full-scale war in Ukraine and one million Russians leave the country, so I ended up capturing history unfolding in real time through these characters that we get to know and living through it with them.
I know you hit the ground running, but what made you even think filming such a situation would be possible?
When you think about it, so many documentaries are about something that happens in the past. It’s already happened and then you’re telling the story. This is a film that’s filmed exactly as it’s happening, so you don’t know what story you’re telling because it’s telling itself. We joke that the Russian Ministry of Justice was in charge of our casting because they were selecting these incredibly beautiful young women to be foreign agents, and we were like, “It’s not our fault that they’re so good looking” because they just happened to be the foreign agents. That’s who they seem to be picking and then the Ministry of Defense of Russia just took over the script and history happened. So everything was a response to things happening on the ground and I was there filming things as they happened, not knowing where they were going. Of course, the characters don’t know either and it’s a strange feeling. People do tell me it feels like a thriller, but as viewers, we know now we know Russia starts a full-scale war in Ukraine, but the characters don’t know this as we’re watching this and they don’t know what will happen to them.
I filmed people where they spent most of their time, which is at work, at home, and in the car getting from work to home, and there were a few public things that I couldn’t go to — for example, protests, because I didn’t have press accreditation — but I was filming so obsessively. I really wasn’t thinking about, “Okay, I’ll be arrested.” I wasn’t really worrying about that, even though this is the first week of the full-scale war and Brittney Griner had recently been arrested. I was literally thinking in a very practical way that if I go and if they take my camera and if they take my microphones, “I’m not going to be able to film, and I am here to film and I want to film this story, so I don’t want them to take away my equipment. I want to get my footage out of the country. I want to keep filming. And without accreditation, I didn’t go to the protest, but one of my characters went, not as a journalist, but as a protester and I said, “Why don’t you film since you’re going anyways?” And obviously she too could be arrested at the protest, but for her, it was morally important to go during the first week of the full scale war, so she went and we [got] our footage.
Did you know pretty immediately who you wanted to follow besides Anna or did it evolve over filming or even the edit?
I immediately clicked with the people that I continued to follow and as soon as I started filming them — often you’re seeing the very first moment I’m meeting them — it’s almost like you’re making a new friend along with the camera. Like the camera is you and you’ve made this new friend and you know you want to follow them.
Anna was our guide into this world and then she introduces us to a bunch of other really sharp, young, funny women journalists. There were a couple of people that I filmed that we didn’t end up following, largely because there were a couple of characters who had already been searched and were out of Russia in the fall of 2021. They’d been forced to leave the country because of criminal prosecution. And we didn’t end up following them just because it was more interesting to follow the story through people who stayed and stayed and stayed until the first week of the full-scale war where everybody was constantly facing this decision of “Okay, how do I keep reporting? Can I continue one more day to tell the truth about the war to Russians and counter propaganda?” And every day this was becoming more and more difficult as Russia was passing new laws, making it a crime to just call the war a war and one by one all my characters had to make the decision — if I go to jail, I can go to jail and then I will be completely useless and not be able to tell the truth about the war or I have to flee the country — and this decision was happening really in a matter of hours.
People were deciding, “Am I going to the office tomorrow? No. Go to the airport.” And then you’re sitting there at literally 2 a.m., calculating “My media just got shut down. I have to be at the airport at 7 a.m. I have to take a taxi home. What do I pack? And first of all, you have to buy a ticket and there weren’t planes flying to Europe or the U.S., but you could go to a few places like Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Mongolia, so you’re going home and you’re deciding what to pack and going to the airport in a matter of hours.
It was amusing, perhaps darkly so, that your previous films have been about people living in isolation, you’re really able to show how people are there for one another in this with these gregarious group scenes, strategizing about a way forward or just providing comfort. Was that something you were excited to show?
It’s definitely the warmest of my films and the most energetic. It is very much a film about love and friendship and community and it’s probably the funniest, although all my films are quite dark but have elements of humor. I’m always interested in how humor and everyday life is there at the most inappropriate moments and humor is a lot of how they deal with it, [as well as] friendship and support and community. It’s also a very fast film, both in how fast these people talk and how fast the editing is. The other films I’ve made have been more contemplative, and this is not a contemplative film.
I’ve heard you talk about how difficult it was to condense conversations down to a matter of minutes, but was it difficult to find the right rhythm for this to feel that urgency?
No, whether it’s the shooting of the film or the editing, it all feels very organic to me. Editing verite is very labor intensive. There’s thousands of cuts in the film and you are creating the sense of life, cutting out the boring bits of life and keeping all the juicy bits and making it feel like it is happening in that exact moment. It is labor, but it is labor I love and I feel like I have been editing for three years because I am still making part two, “Exile,” and just finished the third chapter of that. I love being in that zone when you’re looking at, for example, four hours of people hanging out in a kitchen, talking about things. Most of that isn’t very interesting, but then you try to figure out how to distill it to maybe a five- to ten-minute scene that sometimes has all the great essential moments and feels very organic. But that’s a process I love because it’s also learning from the footage. I don’t approach it like I know what this scene is about and I’m going to look for what I want it to be. I try to just look and see and find all the juicy golden moments.
Did the structure of this as far as how you could condense each chapter into a specific period of time immediately come to mind?
Each chapter in this is a distinct moment in time. With the exception of chapters 4 and 5 are both during the first week of the full scale war, the film unfolds sickeningly chronologically. It is like this ticking clock going towards something, so chapters one, two, three take place at different times as you are slowly moving through this crackdown happening in Russia and just a few weeks makes a difference. The beginning of December feels different than the end of December — it’s a different moment in time. And Chapter three ends with New Year’s Eve in Russia, where things have gotten really, really bad. A lot of journalists are being called foreign agents and there’s a sense of crackdown. Meanwhile, hope against hope, [the journalists we follow are] hysterically trying to put on this New Year’s show on TV Rain, which they titled “We’re Not Dispersing,” trying to bring everyone together and hope for a better new year.
By the end of February, Russia starts a full-scale war in Ukraine and then chapters four and five are that first week of the full-scale war where even the time becomes different than the night before the invasion. The morning of the invasion is a very different time than a week into the invasion [since] you have the initial shock and then keeping going. Then it becomes impossible to work because if you continue telling the truth, you will go to jail. So each chapter is structured in that way and the nice thing about chapters is it gave me the opportunity to [think of it] like a fiction series almost where you have one character that will come to the foreground, other characters will recede to the background, and then someone else takes the lead and it’s constantly woven that way where you’re going along with people and then you rejoin them and it keeps going like that.
Was there anything that changed your ideas of what this would be or add a dimension to the story that you might not have expected from the start?
Obviously, at the start, I thought it was a film about journalists being called others and a society declaring its citizens other and suspect. And then Putin started a war and though it should not have been a surprise, the the actual turn of history and being there capturing it as a million people left was the biggest surprise. But the best thing I can hope for as a filmmaker, and it’s something that requires constant practice, is to approach [a film] not knowing and with curiosity, whether it’s filming or it’s editing. I always approach something like I don’t know, and I’m going to try to find out and learn from these people and from this footage. It’s also the most thrilling part.
I understand normal people when they make documentaries, they say “Well, we’re going to go film this and you’re going to do that.” I think that’s pretty common. I had no idea what we would be doing. I just went along with people and let them lead. All of the characters are storytellers. They’re journalists, and in a way, I think they’re directing from in front of the camera. I just follow them into a room. I don’t know what they’re going to show me there. I just keep up, and I have to say, I am a little bit of an adrenaline junkie, so that is a very exciting way of filming for me, not to have a plan, but to be in this constantly super hyper alert state where you’re just having to run with people. There’s stuff in the film where I’m walking with people just down the street and all I’m trying to do is just keep the camera focused on them and hold it steady and not to fall on my face, which is something Anna is always worried about in the film.
Then you have all this footage, you try to understand, “Well, wait a minute, what’s in here?” Usually, you know in the filming when something spectacular happens or when there’s a good joke, but you’re constantly having to not just look, but listen and anticipate where should the camera be? Oh wait, something interesting just happened. And how do I catch this reaction? Then you are constantly discovering things in the editing where there’s some special moment happening. But it all takes a state of alertness which is incredibly challenging and exciting at the same time. It’s hyper-intense, but really just amazing training for life.
“My Undesirable Friends, Part I – Last Air in Moscow” opens on August 15th in New York at Film Forum, accompanied with filmmaker Q & As after the August 15th screening at 7 pm, the August 16th screening at 4:20 pm and the August 17th screening at 5:20 pm.