James Y. Lee
Note: For additional context on this NYFF review, please visit my review for Part I of My Undesirable Friends here, written for its public release earlier this year.
The last we saw of the journalists in Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Last Air in Moscow, the Russian invasion of Ukraine had just begun, and all of the film’s central women, working for the resistance independent broadcaster TV Rain or other aligned publications, were fleeing the country en masse. Long labeled “undesirables” and “foreign agents” for their independent resistance journalism against the censorship and corruption endemic to Russian society and government, Putin’s war on Ukraine immediately made clear that this censorship would threaten the lives of everyone who dared speak the truth about his regime and his military’s atrocities. And so now—in My Undesirable Friends: Exile, part two of Loktev’s colossal saga—Anya Nemzer, Ksenia Mironova, Sonya Groysman, and the rest of Loktev’s real-life cast now find themselves scattered across the corners of the world. They are going anywhere that isn’t Russia for now, even as they make clear that they must continue their reportage on Russia’s war crimes.
But first, they need to survive, wherever it is they’ve ended up—a menial question of how to establish a living and where it is they’re going to be settling down. Exile picks up directly where Last Air in Moscow left off—a mere two days after the events of that film. Accompanied by fellow journalist Valeria “Lera” Ratnikova, Ksenia has made her way to Istanbul, still reeling from the distress of exile and barely concealing it, all while they start to hear news of their peers’ arrests, of the censorship of Nobel-laureate publication Novaya Gazeta, of the aggression of Putin’s military advances. Anya has brought her family to Israel—a vacation she realizes is the beginning of her exile, as she wrestles with how to tell her daughter Lilka that they will not be going back home. Ira and Alesya, two journalists for Important Stories, have made their way to Prague to continue their work, but only because their editor fled there himself after Russian police raided his home. Meanwhile, Elena Kostyuchenko starts reporting in Ukraine on the frontlines for Novaya Gazeta, where she covers and describes Russia’s violence in stark, unflinching detail—but the eventual shuttering of Novaya’s Russian media license leaves her aimless, eventually fleeing to Poland.
The above list is not an exhaustive account of the massive “cast” that Loktev has amassed, or the detail in which she portrays their whereabouts. The five-and-a-half-hour runtime of Last Air in Moscow is eclipsed by the near-six-hour-long Exile, now executive-produced by documentarian extraordinaire Laura Poitras and Meryl Streep—a reiteration of Loktev’s intimate, completionist, tenacious dedication to on-the-ground footage of these journalists. But these two installments are stories of vastly different focal points, both defined by the inflection point of Putin’s invasion. Last Air in Moscow was never supposed to be a document of how these journalists reacted to the invasion, but rather, an up-close display of these journalists at work under duress. Its resulting, unintentional coup de grace was its final two of five chapters, a spontaneously harrowing portrayal of everyone’s real-time, rushed escapes from Putin’s unescapable reign. As a result, its first three hours infrequently veered into redundant territory, even as the intent of its expansively sprawling detail became hypnotically clear over time. But because Exile‘s “premise” is now apparent from the moment the journalists’ exile occurs, Loktev’s rigorously detailed focus on these journalists now finds legitimate purpose and accumulating effect throughout its entire runtime.
Not unlike its predecessor, chapters 1 to 3 of Exile are about routine; specifically, the process of watching these journalists rediscover their bearings after their exile occurs. For many of them, their reckoning with their exile is a persistent question of where they could possibly call home, an imposed condition of eternal impermanence because of their self-removal from a motherland that no longer wants them. Tbilisi, Georgia quickly becomes the next home for journalists like Anya and Ksenia—the former of whom provides interview-focused commentary for Rain, the latter of whom departs Rain in order to start Help Desk, dedicated to war coverage and reconnecting families caught up in forced emigration, political imprisonment, and self-exile.
Meanwhile, Elena’s move to Poland quickly jumpstarts a plan of persistent relocation from Warsaw to Hamburg, to Munich, and then onward. But another one of her prospective destinations is a return to Russia itself, a fraught question for both her and her partner, Yana, who are worried about the palpable threat to Elena’s life such a move would potentially pose. And former TV Rain reporter Petya finds himself in Vienna, in persistent contact with his wife, Natalka, who also co-hosts with him a podcast called “F*ck the War,” about her experiences remaining in Ukraine and enduring the air raids on the country—a gap that they quickly attempt to bridge once Natalka resolves to leave Ukraine for her safety.
Because of the de-concentrated nature of Exile‘s narrative, with TV Rain no longer a complete hub to meet the journalists that Loktev focuses on, the story of My Undesirable Friends becomes that much more sprawling, and the endeavor of creating it that much more admirable. The longer runtime becomes significantly more warranted this time around; the film now needs to be scattershot in order to provide a complete enough portrait of all of its disparate narrative threads, and for the audience to steadily discover the overlap that exists between these journalists even despite their locations. Not only are these journalists reckoning with the imperative of their profession amid the war, but they’re also reckoning with the fact that they’re Russians—a matter of nationality that touches everything they engage with, from their newfound journalistic endeavors, to their visa applications, to their interactions with the locals in every single country they’re made to live in. There is guilt among them; guilt that they could not fight harder, guilt over the mere phrasing of “our army” in reference to Putin’s military advances, guilt over the Ukrainians that have now fallen under Putin’s autocratic violence.
It is also guilt that they recognize will not be palatable or even widely accepted. Elena utters to Loktev in one of the film’s many car-based conversations, “It’s clear this generation will never forgive,” an awareness of just how dangerous the desire for comfort among their generation has become. Lena’s statement here is not just critique, but also self-aware guilt over her and her peers’ unwillingness to cross the necessary lines in opposition to autocracy. You can’t help but feel for her and the cohort of journalists in this film; how would they have known where those lines were? How thin is the margin between complicit comfort and legitimate safety? Would anything they could have done, any one additional story they could have reported on, ever been enough to flay open the now-unimpeachable reign of Putin’s control over the truth?
The end result is estrangement; an awareness that Alesya reflects in a tirade about how her home still exists and now inaccessible, and the fact that it took this very war for her to understand the depravity of Putin’s reign. They know they could have gone further than they already did. There is a feeling that they may have lost their chance. You also become aware of the extent to which their estrangement from Russia is not just physical, but also ideological. Multiple episodes recur of these journalists’ growing distance from their families back home, who physically cannot bring themselves to understand the extent to which Putin represents a danger to their lives. For these people, war has been compartmentalized into the abstract realm of “politics”; the result of propaganda not as an inducer of action, but a psychological paralytic agent that leads to widespread complicity, hiding behind the moral “duty” of comfort.
But that guilt and compartmentalization cannot last forever. We’ve already seen five hours chronicling months upon months of these women’s persistence in reporting on Russia’s war crimes while on Putin’s turf. It only makes sense for us to see six more hours of them expanding from there and continuing their work even from afar. Even apart from the journalists who continue with their own independent reporting ventures, TV Rain resumes operations soon after in Latvia, where they try as hard as they can to report to a predominantly Russian audience, however hard that reach becomes on a logistical level. Defying boundaries, distance, and exhaustion itself, the team reassembles as many of their members as possible, having them contribute to their resistance reporting by any means necessary. But much like Last Air in Moscow, the final two chapters of Exile are a flurry of devastation in their own right, quieter in nature than the literal onset of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but devastating still in how difficulty continues to trouble these journalists even long after departing Russian soil.
Trouble quickly befalls TV Rain in late 2022 that threatens their position in Latvia. The firing of former anchor Alexey Korostelev, who controversially requested that viewers provide information regarding Russian mobilization efforts to support Russian soldiers with equipment and basic amenities, proves to be a turning point that Loktev follows in great detail. What ensues is a flurry of anger thrown at the channel from every angle that no one is equipped to deal with; a complex reckoning with their fraught positions as Russians standing against Putin, where enraged Ukrainian viewers abandon them for ostensible Russian sympathies that the channel’s leadership immediately retracted, and for which the Latvian administration starts planning to revoke their license out of national security concerns. Meanwhile, the final chapter of Exile is an episode of mourning; not just for journalists like Anya and Elena, who suffer personal losses and have to come to grips with their now-permanently itinerant reality, but also for Ira and Alesya, who realize that they’re being targeted by Russian spies, exposing the limitations of physical distance from Putin’s ruthlessness. Indeed, the killing of Alexei Navalny in prison triggers a definitive wave of grief; a moment that concretely exposes the fragility of the resistance that these journalists have modeled their activism and advocacy over.
If Last Air in Moscow was a film about journalists reckoning with the death of their country, Exile is a film about them understanding that the spirit of what their country could have been, and the demon that it’s now become, will continue to haunt them for as long as they live—both because of their origins, and also because of Russia’s persistence in silencing them. Guilt transforms into the despair of futility; hope becomes a finite resource to draw from, as over time, it becomes clear that Russia is becoming a global model for what is to come. Among the most devastating scenes of Exile is Ksenia in the heart of a Trump rally in January 2025 as she studies journalism in the New York Film Academy; one of the few cinematic portrayals of Donald Trump that has ever tangibly deepened the extent of his authoritarian evil. You watch as she plunges into despair over the fact that the same patterns of Putin’s despotism are reemerging here in the U.S. and infecting the American populace with the same fervor that it also infected the Russian people. Watching her—and seeing how the other journalists have continued in Prague, in New York, in Ukraine, and elsewhere from Russia, battered but unwavering, weakened but still persistent—the dreaded question arises again, the same as it did from Last Air in Moscow, of if Loktev’s diptych will ever stop becoming a warning and instead turn into a prophecy for America, as well.
It is time to find out. As of this review’s writing, Donald Trump has banned CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from the White House press pool based on their political leanings.
