In the intro to My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow, director Julia Loktev states that none of the subjects or herself could have known what was about to happen in the coming months. It’s Moscow late in the fall of 2021, and Loktev has arrived to research how her dissident journalist friends are now getting labeled as “foreign agents” by the Russian government. Loktev first meets up with Anna Nemzer, who shows her around TV Rain and brings her into the broader Moscow counter-cultural scene. Rain is a well-organized operation, a full-fledged news network that even has guests playing poppy protest songs. It seems like the liberal order is a permanent one. But, as we the audience already know, that will not be the case. There’s a classical dramatic tension to My Undesirable Friends — with us the viewers aware of the documentary subjects’ destinies before they are. It makes it all the more haunting how quiet the slow build over the near five-and-a-half-hour runtime is.
Loktev keeps her camera close to her subjects, almost too close for comfort. She shoots closeups with wide-angle lenses, achieving an extraordinary intimacy while always showing her characters as subject to their environment. There are two really striking aspects to this approach, the first being that it was essentially organic. In a post-critic’s screening Q&A, Loktev explained that she had planned to work with a cameraman, but at an initial meeting being hosted at one of the journalist’s apartments, they told Loktev they would feel more comfortable if it was just her. Loktev began filming on her phone and didn’t stop, keeping her phone close as the women’s precarious journalistic situation deteriorated before anyone could believe it. The discrete nature of Loktev’s camera lent itself to security as well, but that is not to say that Loktev herself becomes a fly on the wall. The director creates the kind of intimate portraiture that is usually more reserved for fiction here.
The second really extraordinary thing about this unflinching intimacy is it becomes clear just how young most of the film’s subjects are. Most of the dissident journalists and pundits at TV Rain are in their 20s, clawing against a system that is trying to keep them from taking control over their own future. That becomes a complete impossibility by Chapter 4 of the film, when Russia launches its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, shocking even the closest of observers. What first was a creeping feeling that something was changing, the feeling that brought Loktev and her camera to Moscow in the first place, turned out to be an all-too-real omen. The world had changed forever, and everyone’s lives were now completely upheaved. In the last two chapters of My Undesirable Friends, the characters’ youth that was hidden behind the professionalism of their news recordings but revealed by Loktev’s intimacy completely slips away — even if they are still literally young, their youth is gone, and you can see it on their faces. The journalists are forced by circumstance to no longer have lives of their own and still, incredibly, they keep reporting for as long as they can before it becomes clear that they only have hours left to flee the country entirely. Even in the collapse of optimism, their drive never falters.
Published as part of NYFF 2024 — Dispatch 3.
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