My Undesirable Friends
Being alive in the age of instant access to information can give us the deluded impression that we already know, or can easily find out, everything. Of course, no one can—least of all, those living in Russia, who have, in the past four years, seen all independent media wiped out by the regime of President Vladimir Putin, and are now left only with an Orwellian river of lies and propaganda. Russians, for the most part, don’t actually know what’s going on in Ukraine, for instance—how could they?
How this decimation of independent news came to be, from the perspective of the young Russian journalists who watched it happened, is the focus of Julia Loktev’s new documentary, My Undesirable Friends, Part I – Last Air in Moscow. This expansive account—the first part clocks in at nearly five-and-a-half hours, and the as yet unreleased second part is still being edited—is the kind of film you live in, rather than merely observe.
Loktev, a filmmaker and artist born in Russia and educated in the United States and Canada, is known for two restless, provocative dramas—Day Night Day Night (2006) and The Loneliest Planet (2011), starring Gael García Bernal—neither of which was filmed in Russia. In 2018, Putin’s fourth presidential election sent her back to her homeland, where her young, female journalist friends were facing an increasingly dire situation amid new laws intended to strangle independent media.
Hence, the film’s title: Loktev’s cheery, relentless young friends are the stars of this visit to a historical bottoming-out, as Putin returns Russia to its prior state of centralized authoritarianism. The women are mostly reporters and editors for TV Rain, a subscriber-based broadcast channel with an audience among the country’s sizable educated—and mostly anti-Putin—demographic.
There’s chain-vaping, spirited Anna Nemzer, host of Who’s Got the Power?, high-strung with the tension of protecting her young daughter from Putin’s propaganda; Sonya Groysman and Olga Churakova, a pair of producers and editors who host a satirical anti-Putinism podcast; editor Alesya Marokhovskaya, who is well aware that her office is bugged by the Kremlin; reporter and editor Irina Dolinina, who adopts a one-eyed bulldog to offset her stress; and, perhaps most poignantly, reporter and editor Ksenia Mironova, who continues to pump out stories even as her coworker fiancée is held imprisoned and charged with espionage.
Each of them might as well be wearing a bullseye as the media-restrictive laws rain down upon them. They are particularly horrified and amused to find themselves declared “foreign agents” by the Russian government based on no evidence whatsoever, as well as by a new law mandating that any communication, even a vacation photo posted on Instagram, be prefaced with a lengthy, State-authored disclaimer purporting that they serve foreign powers and are disseminating anti-Russian “influence.” Foreign-agent status becomes a badge of honor; Olga and Sonya even titled their podcast Hi, You’re a Foreign Agent. They’re all too young to remember the Soviet era—they assume at first that Putin is simply antagonizing them, like Donald Trump’s “flooding-the-zone” strategy developed by Steve Bannon.
Loktev shot most of her film during the winter months leading up to Russia’s sudden and bewildering invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Her friends are there on the cutting edge, even interviewing the oblivious soldiers being shipped out to the Donbas, but no one foresees the war to come, or the instant pressure it will put on journalists to flee the country or risk being arrested. Even after the bombing has begun, the official media channels deny that it’s happening, and like all other independent media, TV Rain is forbidden to use the word “war.” Instead, the news chyrons read “What’s Happening in Ukraine.” As Olga confides to Loktev during a nighttime car ride, “Is it really possible to take tens of millions of people and cut them off from the whole world?”
Loktev’s film is immersive; though the film will be presented in two installations in theaters, its length and its intimacy make it ideal for at-home binge-viewing. You grow to love this sisterhood of defiant young women, who speak directly to Loktev through her camera with captivating frankness, articulation, and dark humor. (Several other figures, including the journalists’ life partners, do not allow their faces to appear in the film.) Meanwhile, the lunacy of the Putinist doublespeak, as it systematically crowds out rational thought and independent conclusions in favor of maddening propaganda, is appropriately nerve-wracking.
Deep into the film, viewers also realize that while she never presents herself center stage, Loktev has taken many of the same risks as her friends, even getting in the cab that finally takes the self-exiling Alesya and Irina, along with their dogs, to the Latvian border. When the word arrives that the TV Rain offices will be raided, Loktev runs with everyone else, filming all the while. Soon enough, the borders will probably close. Then what?
So much of the nonsensical autocratic repression cooked up by Putin and his minions can seem frighteningly familiar to us in the United States right now, as our federal safeguards on multiple fronts are being whimsically shredded, media companies are facing blackmail in the form of lawsuits and threats, and universities are being stripped of funding. Independent media, like this magazine, still thrives, but the battle may just be beginning. You can only assume that Trump sees the thoroughness of Russia’s media chokehold and fumes with envy. Amid all of this, Loktev’s documentary boils with that weird superpower that some political documentaries manage to muster. You feel that by just watching it, living in its space, you’re doing something vital—participating in and committing to its outrage, at least.