My Undesirable Friends: The Sad, Inspiring Story of The Suffocation of Russia’s Independent Press
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
The documentary My Undesirable Friends — Part 1: Last Air in Moscow finished on several prominent Top 10 lists last year, including those of The New York Times and Screen International.
I knew the film by Russian-born, American-raised filmmaker Julia Loktev was about independent women journalists, struggling under Russia’s press restrictions but I had not read any reviews.
Since the film had not been released theatrically, I was happy to see it was coming to the streaming service MUBI. What I had not realized was the reason why it had not come to a theatre near me: the film is five-and-a-half hours long.
Couldn’t this be edited down to a taut, impactful 90-minutes? What a mistake that would have been.
The film is immersive, in the sense of the frog in gradually heating water, where you reach boiling point before you realize it. Loktev, shooting in apartments, cars, and ramshackle Moscow offices, has created a structure that resembles a TV workplace drama, where you gradually get to know and like the ensemble cast of women in their 20s and 30s, who look like your co-workers, friends, and family.
They quote Snoop Dog and make frequent allusions to Harry Potter. They like to dance and vape and drink and dress like skater boys. But they’re also group of politically idealistic, sharp-witted women journalists.
The twist is that this a Black Mirror version of journalism. They’re trying to report the facts in a state where the truth is illegal, a dilemma one describes as “schizophrenic bullshit.”
The entire film unfolds under a foreboding shadow. “The world you are about to see no longer exists,” director Loktev tells us in voiceover in the film’s opening minutes. This is a film of Russia’s “before times,” before the 2022 Ukraine invasion, before the independent press was shut down.
Loktev’s gateway into the world of Russian independent journalism world was through her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk show host for the independent and now-defunct television channel TV Rain. (The “last air” refers to a final broadcast, as well as suggesting the suffocation of the press).
Anna’s troublesome reporting causes the Ministry of Justice to designate her and reporters like her as “foreign agents,” or Russians working for foreign agents. That bogus disclaimer must be appended to all their journalistic work.
Naturally, they find the label absurd. In one scene, they organize a James Bond–themed photo shoot in sexy gowns, depicting themselves as slinky “foreign agents.” But on the serious side, the charge leads to a fine, which then can be escalated to a prison sentence.
Loktev, shooting mostly on her iPhone, follows Nemzer (credited as a co-director of the film) around Moscow, tagging along on her interviews with various activists or hanging out with her friends. As weeks roll by, we meet another half-dozen women writers, podcasters, and field reporters her orbit.
There’s Ksenia Mironova, Sonya Groysman, Olga Churakova, Irina Dolinina, Aleysa Marokhovskaya and Elena Kostyuchenko.
The women, often laughing, describe how their homes were invaded and electronically bugged, about the fake phone calls and absurd attacks from government media. But as the months go by, as the Russian invasion is imminent, the mood shifts from absurd to bleakly dystopian.
The women are astonishingly brave. At times, they break down and cry, but more often, they still manage to tuck their fear into jokes. ‘Which underwear do you choose when government goons take you away in the middle of the night?’
The final episodes focus on Mironova, a 23-year-old reporter, whose boyfriend she may never see again. He’s in prison, facing a lengthy sentence for the vaguely defined crime of “treason.”
The last footage shown here was on March 2, 2022, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when the last subjects of the film flee the country before facing prison. The arc of the story is heartbreaking and, in the context of the Trump administration’s assault on the media, unnervingly close to home.
Yet the women’s resilience is inspirational, and we have not heard the last of the story. My Undesirable Friends: Part II is scheduled to be released this fall. Let’s hope it is at least another five hours long.
My Undesirable Friends — Part I: Last Air in Moscow. Directed by Julia Loktev. With Anna Nemzer, Ksenia Mironova, Sonya Groysman, Olga Churakova, Irina Dolina, Aleysay Marokhovskaya, Elena Kostyuchenko. The film, in two parts, is now available on the streaming site, MUBI which offers a 7-day free trial.