“I’ve pretty much given up on this country,” a friend texted me last week. The past several months—and it has, unbelievably, been only that long—have played out like the climax of a Roland Emmerich movie, as one American institution after another has crumbled in the face of a previously unimaginable assault. The nation’s top universities and its most powerful law firms, its largest companies and most venerable media giants, have succumbed to the president’s arm-twisting with little more than a whimper—or, in some cases, prostrated themselves without even needing to be asked. Government agencies have been snuffed out overnight, masked law-enforcement officers roam the streets, and the welfare state has been slashed to free up money for vast new detention centers. The question can feel less whether it’s time to give up on this country than whether we still have a country to give up on.
It might not, then, seem like the ideal time to watch a five-and-a-half-hour documentary about the plight of the free press in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow grabs you from its opening frames and, despite its substantial length, never loosens its grip on your soul. Watching the final vestiges of a free society slip away in what almost feels like real time, we can see her characters struggling to come to grips with what their country is becoming, and how best to push back without losing their own freedoms in the process. It’s devastating in its delineation of how brutally a determined and unrestrained state can strip citizens of their essential rights, and exhilarating in the way they draw strength from one another. In other words, it’s about as important and timely as it’s possible for a movie to be.
Loktev was born in the former Soviet Union, but her family immigrated to Colorado in the 1970s, and though she had been back periodically over the years and still speaks fluent Russian, it “wasn’t a place I spent a whole lot of time,” as she told me in her Brooklyn apartment last week. But when she read an article in the summer of 2021 about young Russian journalists being forced to declare themselves “foreign agents” for reporting critically on the Putin regime, she had a feeling that she needed to start filming them as soon as she possibly could. The country was just starting to lift COVID restrictions and readmit foreigners, and by October, she was on the ground, unknowingly capturing what turned out to be the final four months before the invasion of Ukraine, and the effective end of the free press in Russia. As Loktev’s opening narration informs us, “The world you’re about to see no longer exists.”
The initial plan was to make a movie about journalists dealing with the absurdity of Russia’s foreign agent law, which requires people or institutions designated as such by the government to preface every public communication, whether it’s a news broadcast or an Instagram post, with a mandatory block of text that Loktev’s characters call “the fuckery.” The foreign agent designation also requires them to report their income and expenses to the government and bars them from running for public office or teaching in schools. One Russian blogger was even fined for posting the text in too small a font. “I remember thinking, What if you could make a film in Germany in 1935, when the Nuremberg Laws were first passed, forcing a part of society to mark themselves as others?” Loktev recalls. And though she wasn’t required to, she periodically breaks up her own movie with the screen-filling block of text, to simulate the disruption Russian viewers would encounter anytime they strayed from state-run media.
The first of Part I’s five hourlong episodes still bears the title of what she thought would be the entire film: The Lives of Foreign Agents. But as she kept shooting, from October 2021 through the beginning of the war on Ukraine in February 2022, the list of “foreign agents” grew from a few dozen to several hundred, and the restrictions on press freedoms got more and more severe, her subjects’ situations more and more dangerous. As for the threat to her, Loktev says, “I tried not to think about it.”
When we watch a disaster movie, we savor the experience of knowing what’s about to strike before the characters do, tallying up their fatal missteps while we’re safe in our seats. But the people in My Undesirable Friends aren’t blithely going about their business as a storm gathers in the distance. They’re already in it up to their knees, and they just don’t know how deep the water’s going to get. As the laws tighten and the months pass, the characters, many of whom work for TV Rain, Russia’s last independent news channel, keep wondering out loud whether it’s finally time to leave the country. But it’s difficult to square their own increasingly fraught situations with the stubborn normalcy of the world around them. Even on the night that Russia started bombing Ukraine, Loktev says, she was waiting for one of her subjects at a café near TV Rain’s offices and realized that the people at the next table were on a Tinder date. “Part of the authoritarian attempt is this sense when you’re living through it that life continues to look normal around you, and you feel slightly schizophrenic,” she says. “You feel like you’re going crazy—like, Is this really happening? There’s still matcha lattes everywhere.”
Even the lives of Loktev’s characters can seem disorientingly normal at times. Yes, they’re under constant threat of being fined or shut down or worse. The movie’s youngest subject, 23-year-old Ksenia Mironova, is the fiancée of journalist Ivan Safronov, who was jailed for treason in July 2020 and eventually sentenced to 22 years in prison. But they’re also young people who gather for raucous dinners and razz each other’s cooking, who drop offhand references to Gossip Girl and bemoan the fact that they can’t stop hate-watching Emily in Paris. (Russians are also, it turns out, really, really into Harry Potter.) It’s a sobering political document, and a terrifying premonition of what lies ahead, but it’s also a superlative hangout movie.
Loktev shot My Undesirable Friends on a succession of iPhones, and although that wasn’t her initial plan—you can, if you watch closely, spot the point at which she upgrades to a more recent model—it allowed her an extraordinary degree of intimacy. “I was around other people shooting some of the same events at the same time I was,” she recalls, “and they were like 10 feet farther back than I was, because that’s as close as they could get with their cameras.” Apart from the opening narration and the few sentences of text that end each episode, there’s little in the way of exposition, and she avoids the use of “lower third” captions to explain who her subjects, many of them well-known figures, are. We see Anna Nemzer, the host of a TV Rain show called Who’s Got the Power?, posing for a photo shoot in sparkly eveningwear, a tongue-in-cheek riff on the government branding her a secret agent. But instead of the glamorous result, the movie focuses on her discomfort, her almost palpable desire to shrug off the fancy dress and get back to work. Loktev’s characters are identified by their diminutive nicknames and not their formal bylines—Nemzer is Anya, Mironova is Ksyusha—and the overall effect is like being welcomed to a bustling dinner party already in progress. You might not catch every name or job description, but hang around long enough, and you start to feel like part of the group.
Among her fellow exiles, Mironova tells me, the standard response to Colbert’s cancellation was “Welcome to Russia in the ’90s and 2000s.”
“Everyone, every character, was a famous journalist,” says Mironova, who now lives in New York. “But we are famous for a very little circle. We are not rich stars. What I like about this movie a lot is that I can see girls with their dogs or Anya just cooking, because that’s how she deals with her stress, and I understand that completely. I think almost every person can understand.”
Mironova will be appearing on a panel at New York’s Film Forum, where My Undesirable Friends begins its American theatrical run, this weekend, along with Loktev and Nemzer. But she admits she’s never been able to watch the entire movie, which ends with her in tears, choosing to flee a country whose streets are filled with anti-war protesters and the armed troops sent to subdue them. (The second part, which Loktev is still editing, will be subtitled Exile.) Loktev had her subjects check the footage to ensure that there was nothing in the movie that might endanger anyone—some minor characters’ faces are blurred, others kept carefully just outside the frame—but Mironova said she could only bear to watch her scenes at double speed, and even then, she mostly just listened to the dialogue. When the movie premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, she asked the staff to wait until the end credits started rolling to bring her into the theater, “because the last episode ends with me crying and leaving, and I remember what comes after.”
On the day I spoke to Mironova, National Guard troops were beginning to arrive in Washington, and news was circulating about CBS’ plan to appoint a “bias monitor” to oversee its news coverage, the latest in a series of seeming concessions to a relentlessly partisan Federal Communications Commission that included canceling Stephen Colbert’s top-rated late-night show, which frequently took jabs at Trump. Despite the obvious differences between Russia and the U.S., it’s impossible to watch My Undesirable Friends and not feel the tumblers falling into place, the parallels that once seemed unimaginable and now feel unavoidable. Among her fellow exiles, Mironova says, the standard response to Colbert’s cancellation was “Welcome to Russia in the ’90s and 2000s. This is exactly what was going on in Russia 20 years ago.” That’s not to say the U.S. will end up like Russia. But we can no longer be sure that we won’t.
Even after 20 years of Putin, Mironova says, it was hard to believe that things would get as bad as they did as fast as they did. “Even when it seemed inevitable,” she recalls, “it still was absolutely impossible.” No one knows more clearly than My Undesirable Friends’ characters how far the rule of law has deteriorated. And yet, up until the moment bombs started falling in Ukraine, many chose to stick it out, fighting battles they knew would be futile because, as Nemzer explains, there still needs to be a record of what happened. “One of the interesting things for me in the film is this question of: What do you do when you live in a country where your government is doing terrible things, and how do you continue to function as the opposition in that country?” Loktev says. “Do you put on plays? Do you continue to work as a journalist? Do you continue to work as an activist for people with disabilities, for homeless people, people with HIV? Or are you supposed to leave that country and leave it to the dictator?”
In the end, the people in My Undesirable Friends don’t have a choice: It’s either flee and continue their work in exile, or stay and end up in prison. Part I leaves them at a heartbreaking juncture, especially Mironova, who has to be convinced that she can do more to advocate for her fiancé’s release abroad than she could in a Russian jail. And yet even as she acknowledges that the previous year and a half has been the worst in her life, she says that it’s also been the best. “I saw a lot of light in my colleagues,” she tells me. “And I had people around me who fought a lot for our future, even if we lost. Part of my life is still awful. But I had this chance to experience real love, and how people can support each other, and how kind they can be in a very, very dark time.”
As a journalist, Mironova doesn’t think much of the American press, or at least the major media companies who have lost touch with the struggles of ordinary people. But she also sees the U.S. as a place where strong communities already exist, and those bonds need to be strengthened, both to fight the rise of authoritarianism and to keep one another sane. “Just be together,” she says. “Spend more time together.”
It may not seem as if the crisis is urgent—there are, indeed, still matcha lattes. But it’s been less than a year since My Undesirable Friends first screened in the U.S., and whatever comforting distance there might have been between the people in the movie and the people watching it has all but vanished. “Even between October, when we knew kind of what was coming and hoped it wasn’t, and now, it just feels very different,” Loktev says. “It still felt like a film about nasty things that happen in nasty faraway places, and now we’ve become the nasty close place.”
