Venice: ‘My Undesirable Friends’ Director on Epic Documentary About Death of Press Freedom in Russia, How Putin’s Crackdown Is Warning for U.S.

If her epic, Oscar-shortlisted documentary “My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 — Last Air In Moscow” pulled off an astonishing feat, chronicling the last gasps of press freedom in Vladimir Putin’s Russia in real time, docmaker Julia Loktev somehow manages to raise the stakes in the film’s arresting sequel. Premiering out of competition in the Venice Open strand of the Venice Film Festival, “My Undesirable Friends: Part 2 — Exile” offers a remarkable bookend to its predecessor. Following “Last Air’s” subjects in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Loktev offers an intimate portrait of journalists under threat as they flee their homeland and attempt to rebuild their shattered lives abroad. Speaking to Variety over Zoom, Loktev unpacks the relationship between the two films while insisting the second part is “a much more complex story.” Popular on Variety “It takes place over four and a half years versus four and a half months,” she says. “And it’s a much more emotional story. It’s people who have had to leave their country on a moment’s notice.” Beginning in the fall of 2021, the first chapter of Loktev’s documentary epic charted the months leading up to the Ukraine invasion. Part two begins just two days later with her subjects in flight, some leaving Moscow within hours of learning that their employer, TV Rain, the independent news station that had been designated an “undesirable organization” by the Kremlin, was set to be raided by the police. The New York-based Loktev, who was born in the former Soviet Union but emigrated to the U.S. as a child with her family, admits that she didn’t expect the documentary she’d set out to make five years ago would become so Tolstoyan in scope, ultimately spanning nearly 12 hours across 10 chapters. (Part 2 will screen in Venice with an intermission.) The director initially planned to chronicle a group of independent journalists who had been declared “foreign agents” by the Russian government. Looking back, Loktev says, “I had absolutely no idea that I [would be] capturing history.” Several months after filming began, Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. Independent media, already imperiled due to the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent, was all but outlawed. Effectively branded enemies of the state, the journalists whose lives she documented in “Last Air in Moscow” scattered across Europe and the U.S., with Loktev filming “Exile” as they settled into new lives from Istanbul to Amsterdam, from Prague to New York. It was, Loktev says, a “strange nomadic existence.” Armed with little more than her trusted iPhone X, she captures her subjects at their most unguarded, revealing moments of fear, vulnerability and, above all, courage as they navigate what she describes as the new “normal not normal” of their lives. It will be difficult for American audiences to watch “My Undesirable Friends” and not see echoes of our country’s own rightward tilt during this Trump presidency, even though Loktev began filming “deep in the Biden era.” “It seemed very far away,” she says, of the second Trump administration and its sweeping assaults against civil liberties. In a scene from the film, one of her protagonists shares a message she composed to her younger self: “Stay alarmed, be hysterical if you need to, and know that it’s very easy to lose your country.” It’s a warning echoed by Loktev. “We have to be very aware of the fear where we internalize the pressures. Where you don’t say something you could have said. Where you don’t do something you could have done,” she says. “I think we’re all plenty anxious now….Hopefully that doesn’t become an anxiety that is paralyzing. It should be an anxiety that is mobilizing.”