Julia Loktev’s new documentary begins almost like a tense Hollywood spy thriller. The journalists she’s filming on her iPhone scramble to get out of Russia, many without a plan or lodging and with only a carry-on suitcase full of hastily packed things, hoping they’re not held up at the border.
At nearly six hours, “My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile,” which opens in select theaters this weekend, is the second half of Loktev’s portrait of Russian journalists and the culmination of a five-year project. It began with Loktev filming a group of independent journalists in Moscow in the fall of 2021 as Vladimir Putin was starting to declare some reporters “foreign agents.”
Four months later, the situation changed dramatically: Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and many journalists fled the country on only a few hours’ notice. Loktev kept filming, following her subjects as they reported on the war in exile.
“People hear, they’re like, ‘Oh my god a six-hour film about journalists? That’s really scary.’ But it’s actually not,” Loktev told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “It’s kind of a hangout film. It’s a friendly film.”
The film is long, but it’s not a slog
In the attention economy, a nearly six-hour documentary about anything might sound like a hard sell. Loktev knows this.
She went through it with the first film, “My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow,” which was shortlisted for an Oscar nomination and is currently streaming on MUBI. That documentary — a portrait of journalists working in a society on the verge of shutting down all press freedoms — is nearly 5 1/2 hours long.
Now she is doing it again, and neither time with the help of a traditional theatrical distributor. A publicist even recently told her that she’s hearing that people don’t want to watch it because they’re “kind of tired about hearing about press freedoms and authoritarianism.”
“I’m like, that’s really interesting, because authoritarianism isn’t tired of them,” Loktev said.
But the thing about the “My Undesirable Friends” movies is that somehow, despite the heavy subject matter, the sprawling runtime and the many characters, they don’t feel like homework. You also don’t need to see “Part I” to dip into “Part II.”
The main reason is that her subjects, most of whom are in their 20s and 30s, are so engaging and relatable despite being in extraordinary circumstances. It’s also why she didn’t tire of filming them.
“This is a film about very ordinary people who are just trying to do something good in an awful time,” Loktev said. “The film is so much about perseverance and how do you keep telling the story when attention moves away? … How you maintain optimism, or at least enough optimism, to get up the next morning and do your job?”
Since 2021, Russian authorities have labeled dozens of outlets and journalists as “foreign agents” — a designation aimed at discrediting them that also prevents them from selling advertising. They have also outlawed and imprisoned journalists. Many outlets have moved their newsrooms abroad since the first weeks of the war in Ukraine and are accessible in Russia via virtual private networks, or VPNs.
Loktev speaks Russian and filmed her subjects on an iPhone
Loktev was born in the former Soviet Union in 1969 and immigrated to the U.S. with her family when she was 9 years old. She continued speaking Russian with her mother, which made it easier to parachute into this world. Her entry point was Anna Nemzer, who worked for the independent television news network TV Rain.
Loktev filmed everyone with her iPhone, which helped her almost disappear into the background. Part II had her traversing European countries constantly as everyone had dispersed.
After the invasion, Loktev left Russia a little later than her subjects: She wanted to make sure she had uploaded her footage to the cloud before attempting to exit the country with her tourist visa. She’d been warned that when an official is looking at a passport a little longer than usual and says that the “computer is hanging” that it means “they’re checking you out.”
“I was standing there … at the airport in Moscow and I’m like, ‘Is there an issue?’ and they’re like, ‘No, no our computer’s just hanging,’” she said. “It was hanging for a good 20 minutes. I tried not to pee my pants.”
The fantasy of making a ‘Part III’
Several of the subjects, including Nemzer, joined Loktev at the Venice Film Festival for the film’s world premiere. Many still work as journalists from afar. But one switches focus midway through the second film: Peter Ruzavin, a former Russian journalist who is married to a Ukrainian journalist, decided to enlist in the Ukrainian army. He said he realized that although his journalism was showing reality, it wasn’t changing it.
“We need not to run away from Putin. We need to fight him,” Ruzavin, who has served in the Ukrainian army for over two years, said in Venice. “That’s why I made my decision. I left the best work. I miss it every day.”
In the past few days, Loktev has seen some interesting headlines about her film, like one in The Daily Beast that reads “Vladimir Putin’s ‘War Crimes’ Exposed in Shocking New Film.” While hers is not an exposé on war crimes, it is a reminder, she said, of what the journalists in the film are trying to do when everyone else’s attention has shifted.
“I think that’s something that we’re struggling with now in a way with the film, I’ll be honest, is that everybody moves on to the next thing,” Loktev said. “But the last thing hasn’t changed.”
The fantasy, she said, would be to make a “Part III” — “if ever the political situation in Russia changes.”
“But I think we might be very old by then.”
___
Associated Press reporter Dasha Litvinova in Tallinn, Estonia, contributed to this story.