James Y. Lee
If you look up the whereabouts of independent Russian television station TV Rain, you’re likely to notice that from 2022 onwards, they’ve been stationed in the Netherlands. To tell the story of how they wound up there is to the tell the story of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that year, and the consequences on free speech it had on the entire Russian population. It’s also, as filmmaker Julia Loktev sharply intuited, to tell the story of the female journalists who stood at the helm of TV Rain against the barrage of censorship already endemic within the country, before the invasion ruthlessly closed the walls in around them.
Loktev’s return to filmmaking in 13 years after The Loneliest Planet (2011) comes in the form of the two-part docu-saga My Undesirable Friends, the first part of which (titled Last Air in Moscow) is finally seeing a release in the United States after the film’s premiere in 2024. Labeling this particular five-hour-long documentary as a film seems somewhat inappropriate; Last Air in Moscow is segmented into five individual chapters, each of which have their own end credits like their own serialized episodes. (Even the screener on which this film was viewed was divided into two parts, from chapters 1-3 and chapters 4-5). It’s a massive, totemic chronicle, willing to take an unusual amount of time in its sprawling portrayal of this specific Russian journalistic enterprise.
There’s a reason for that, baked into Loktev’s production process. Initially, My Undesirable Friends was intended to be a straightforward documentary on the work that TV Rain’s reporters were doing on Russia’s suppression. But much to the surprise of everyone involved and portrayed, Loktev started filming the news station months before February 2022, the month that Russia initiated its invasion of Ukraine and trigged the years-long war persisting to this very day. As a result, chapters one through three are, by all appearances, the film that Loktev initially wanted to make. Here, she journeyed her way through the people behind TV Rain’s operations and got a sense of their stories, as well as the individual risks they were taking as they chronicled the abuses of Putin’s regime.
“The world you are about to see no longer exists,” Loktev almost warns us at the start of the film, as if to note that the portrait of debate and quiet resistance that ensues for a time belongs to a country that died with the right to free speech. So here, she posits, were the people who tried to keep that world alive before they couldn’t anymore, who resisted as much as they could while not being able to foresee the abject terror barreling towards them. Loktev’s camera is not one of a passive outside observer. The journalists she encounters are people she deems friends, and their friends’ friends among them, and so Loktev shares in their company, confiding in their anxieties in a country of perpetual censorship.
You have Anya Nemzer, who runs one of TV Rain’s talk-show segments with a sharp acumen for sociological analysis and platforming the voices of the “undesirable” in Russia. There’s Ksenia Mironova, whose journalist fiancée is behind bars on treason charges, and wonders when and if it might ever be her turn for her contributions. Elena Kostyuchenko works for Novaya Gazeta, several of whose journalists have been murdered by the Russian state for their work, and whose head reporters have received the Nobel Peace Prize for their continued diligence to writing on the truth. Olga Churakova and Sonya Groysman spearhead the podcast “Hi, You’re a Foreign Agent”—a platform for them to discuss the perils of having received the titular label by Putin’s regime. There are others Loktev follows. All of them are “foreign agents” and “extremists,” too.
In the months leading up to the invasion in Ukraine, all media and news outlets disseminating information deemed “undesirable” by Putin’s state were made to label themselves as the work of foreign agents or Russian nationals influenced by foreign interests. That label—a paragraph-long disclaimer attached as a preamble to TV Rain’s news broadcasts, as well as the social media posts of its journalists—became a punchline in its own right at the hands of the people subject to it, even as all of them stewed in the fact that they knew the kind of scarlet letter it represented if they ever were to further step out of line.
The culture of silence this kind of censorship engendered is a subject of fierce debate and conversation among the journalists that Loktev encounters. (In her own words, the first half hour alone of Last Air in Moscow contains more dialogue than the entire rest of her filmography.) They toil amongst themselves in their studios, in their offices, and on the streets, working away at stories they can only hope will push the truth further, yet will only put them further at risk at the hands of a government they know is watching, and is capable of anything. This tenuous balance—between the obscure thanklessness of their work, and the absurdly clear danger of the risk it presents—is one of Last Air in Moscow‘s major points of fascination in its first three chapters.
Loktev’s formal approach to filming them, perhaps the greatest culprit for the film’s exorbitantly long runtime, displays quite an extreme dedication to the principles of vérité. Filmed almost entirely on Loktev’s iPhone with remarkable tenacity and intimacy, My Undesirable Friends tries its hand at a cumulative portrayal of its central journalists, where our focus isn’t just rained on the must extreme and dramatic moments of their lives. We see them hanging out in their apartments and sharing meals, discussing among themselves plans for protests, laughing among themselves with dark humor while they also tensely wait for a course of action, and analogizing their situation to characters in Harry Potter (which musters frequent allusions like a real-life motif throughout the film) to distract from the horrors closing in.
The intended effect is clear; these are people who cannot just be boiled down to the work they do or the highest extremities of their lives. It is also about a life spent in patience—first, the existential patience for the world around you to improve in some way, and then, the procedural patience of having to wait for the next step to get to some kind of safety. But the gossamer-thin line between patience and redundancy feels as though it’s crossed often throughout the first three chapters, whose runtime totals to about three hours and twenty minutes. Enduring a formally edited approximation of “real-time” through the anxiety of censorship with these journalists is one thing. Waiting for the film to present actually new information as it goes on is another. It’s the one major zone where this film formally goes astray, a structural fault of stagnation that seems to have resulted from an overbearing commitment to real-life drudgery and anxiety.
But it’s in the film’s fourth chapter, titled “The Expected Impossible,” that the film really begins to reach greatness. Both the unexpected and possible occur, coalescing in the exact moment that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine begins, and the moment it sinks in to every member of TV Rain that their lives in Russia as they know it are over. Throughout the first three chapters, intertitles make clear that everyone we see on screen now lives in exile from Russia. It’s here that we finally see the tangible reality of how that unfolded, and what that realization actually did to them, as multiple scenes are spent with the journalists as they completely upend their lives overnight. Anya crushingly realizes that her one-week trip with her family might be the start of her exile. Ksenia stays behind, marinating in terror for her and her fiancée’s lives for as long as possible while the TV Rain offices steadily empty out and come under harrowingly immediate threat. Confrontations erupt between the others as they decide between staying and fighting or leaving for their own safety.
The resulting final two hours of Last Air in Moscow remains one of the most harrowingly definitive cinematic portrayals of how human beings reckon with the death of their country. As grim as that sounds, it is a painstakingly documented and material reality, one that everyone was forced to confront as they squeezed their way out of a land that treated them like foreigners and are now willing to deem them “undesirable.” The contemporary resonance of Loktev’s film steadily becomes impossible to ignore—especially for American audiences, for whom our current president and his willing cooperation with Putin makes abundantly clear that authoritarianism in the United States is a reality we need to face with urgency.
Shades of ICE’s invasions of various U.S. cities are visible in the reckless abandon with which Russian police detain protestors and civilians. The “foreign agents” disclaimer evolves from a nervous punchline into a menacing omen in the wake of Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. and their explicit involvement in the censorship of CBS. Our president has made no secret of his overwhelming disdain for the free press and the integrity of the truth. Loktev’s upcoming sequel to Last Air in Moscow, titled Exile, is intended to be an equally massive five-hour portrayal of how these journalists persist in their search for truth in Russia, even while scattered across the world. We can only hope that, in the wake of all the threats to democracy that America has faced in the past year, that our journalists will fight it with the same tenacity as the deeply human, richly rendered, fallibly tenacious women at the frontlines of TV Rain.
