“It isn’t like ‘V for Vendetta,’” a friend tells Sonya in “My Undesirable Friends: Part I: Last Air in Moscow” over an online chat, describing the increasingly authoritarian atmosphere in their native Russia. Rather than the obvious oppression of all citizens, the friend notes, there’s a more insidious feeling when specific clusters of people are being singled out and named as foreign agents and life would appear more or less normal when only certain people are affected and others can carry on without concern. Fittingly, director Julia Loktev doesn’t apply any cinematic gloss to an otherwise epic and extraordinary undertaking in the first installment (comprised of five hour-long episodes) of a series following a group of female journalists targeted under Putin’s regime, with the president publicly claiming to defend reporters while branding so many who dare to do the work as enemies of the state.
The casual quality of the project doesn’t only honor their profession as a piece of matter-of-fact reportage, but answers a question that many of them can’t for themselves in terms of why they do it, as people who feel they have no other choice but to bring others the truth and endure with a grim sense of humor and great camaraderie with those they work alongside to get through the horrors they have to report on. If you’re going to be in the foxhole with anyone for a prolonged period of time, there’s no better company than Ira and Alesya, who work for a video channel called Important Voices and wonder what kind of underwear they would want to be caught in should they be subject to a government raid, or Ksyusha, who says she feels bad listening to trashy music late at night when her place is bugged and she knows she’s inflicting it on others.
Loktev is privy to countless unguarded conversations herself via Anya Nemzer, a talk show host for Rain TV, one of last remaining independent television stations in Russia, who has made a point of bringing free speech advocates onto her show. Credited as a co-director on “My Undesirable Friends,” Nemzer may be bringing cameras into the last remaining ones operations in Moscow, such as her own newsroom at Rain and the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, but her visits to Sonya, Alesya, Ira and Ksyusha act as a kind of support system when all are increasingly disillusioned by what they know from their reporting as Putin sets about positioning military for what they’ll eventually learn is the invasion of Ukraine and opens a second battlefront against those who want to get that information to the public, adding journalists as foreign agents to limit their activity on a weekly basis and surgically erasing other guardians of history such as the country’s oldest human rights organization Memorial, which was dissolved shortly after winning a Nobel Peace Prize for its work on preserving evidence of war crimes during the Soviet era.
With its first two chapters filmed across the fall of 2021 and the last three all set over a handful of days in 2022 as plans to invade Ukraine fully come to light, “My Undesirable Friends” shows how quickly the government can exert control over its citizenry, taking the reporters by surprise even with the foresight they have. Loktev frequently will use the 20/20 hindsight she has to note that the person you’ve just seen on screen has had to flee or perhaps in jail for violating arbitrary and hastily implemented laws regarding speech, usually deployed with cuts to black that come down like a hammer, but it is equally chilling to see Sonya, Alesya, Ira and Ksyusha gradually worn down by the relentless threats they face, never once thinking about giving up their work, yet their good humor giving way to real fear about the future and having to take their personal safety into account.
When “Last Air in Moscow” first premiered last fall at the New York Film Festival, surely it was the fate of Ukraine and what these reporters risked to warn of an impending disaster that was top of mind, but only five months later upon making its bow recently at Berlinale, it strongly resonates as a primer for other countries experiencing a rapid shift towards right-wing nationalism. While it can’t help but be stunning to even those who have been following along for some time to see their country become isolated in an instant as Putin’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine immediately triggers European Union airspace to be off-limits and visas to be denied in other countries, these events weren’t set into motion overnight as the journalists’ diligent dispatches from the field attest, but as Loktev captures the erosion of their rights to report on it was only the beginning of everyone else’s being taken away. As a movie, it’s enormously engrossing, but as a witness to history, “My Undesirable Friends” is truly essential.
“My Undesirable Friends: Last Air in Moscow” does not yet have U.S. distribution.