Though there’s little optimism in the content or title of My Undesirable Friends, the staggering two-part documentary from Julia Loktev, the steel spine holding its twelve hours together is an unshakable shared sense of purpose. The massive monument to journalism, competing in length and ambition with legendary feats of nonfiction like Shoah and the Up series, necessarily expands its scope in its six-hour back half, My Undesirable Friends: Part II—Exile. We called the first part of the documentary “an invigorating alternative to staring into the void of digital nihilism,” because of the bravery and camaraderie its dissident Russian reporters display. In the second part, that nihilism threatens to take hold, only held at bay by a sense of duty, a dedication to informing their countrymen, that transcends their job titles. Unearthing that binding personal ethos, which persists even as careers disappear, lives fall apart, and political fears come to pass, solidifies this undertaking—the longest documentary of the decade so far—as a celebration of truth in an endless fight against deception.
Filmed alongside its predecessor, My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air In Moscow, part two picks up one week after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and two days after the employees of TV Rain, one of Russia’s few remaining independent news sources, escape their home country. Vladimir Putin’s walls have fully closed in on them. In an early conversation, one escaping reporter tells another that “It’s not time to cry, it’s time to leave.” It’s a sentiment echoed and deepened throughout the film. Midway through, a Ukrainian war correspondent explains that there’s no time for panic, just enough time to keep your head down and do the work. Towards the finale, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is murdered in prison. Though everyone at TV Rain is weeping, especially the younger people who grew up inspired by Navalny’s activism, they work through it, fighting despair not with misplaced hope but with a commitment to information. There is no truer soundtrack to the 2020s than the commingled sounds of crying and typing.
While this idea rarely gets that poignant and pointed, it’s one that links the disparate subjects of Exile. Their outlet has been outlawed, their country has waged a war of aggression, and their lives have been scattered to the wind. Last Air In Moscow was the long whistle of a dropping bomb; Exile follows the trajectory of the shrapnel. This human debris—Anna Nemzer, Ksenia Mironova, Sonya Groysman, Olga Churakova, Irina Dolinina, Alesya Marokhovskaya, and more anchors, writers, reporters, editors, and other news workers—live lifetimes in just a few years, while feeling like, as one of these subjects describes it, both German and Jew on the brink of WWII. They flee for their lives while still feeling complicit in the atrocities. The rest of the world reinforces this: They were second-class Russians because they published the truth; they’re second-class emigrants because they’re Russian.
This leaves Loktev, rather than just sticking with a consolidated group resisting in Moscow, hopping between all the places where these political refugees have scraped together temporary visas, leases, and bank accounts. Exile is still full of unvarnished, hilarious, humanizing moments: When a journalist struggles to close the suitcase she escaped with, she complains that she “didn’t grow her fat ass for nothing.” Another copes with her hardships by singing Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” to herself. Some of them settle in Istanbul, others in Tbilisi, a few in Prague. All of them become like family over the hours of close-up conversations. TV Rain lands in Latvia, though a minor wording gaffe (a governmental, possibly disingenuous misunderstanding about the on-air phrase “our army”) gets them kicked out—an ironic cruelty considering how deeply these workers have devoted themselves to the power and meaning of words. As Putin’s influence spreads, and the war’s front marches forward, the journalists must move again and again. Roots seem impossible while life goes on. Parents die, marriages fall apart, new loves blossom, cancer takes hold, friendships form, and apartments need decorating. Exile‘s subjects do what they can while on the run, their bodies elsewhere but their minds always belonging to home.
In this painful incompatibility, Loktev watches as duty clarifies and understanding blossoms. Some older, Kool-aid-drunk family members finally seem to get it—why their relatives have invested so much in making their own lives difficult—while others’ ignorance persists. Why can’t these women just come back home? Or at least find something new to do that won’t get them arrested at the airport? Over the course of Exile, it becomes clear that this wouldn’t just be a betrayal of professional ethics, but a dissolution of identity. One of their laptop stickers bears the Orwell quote, “Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed,” but the subjects aren’t stubbornly clinging to the designation of “journalist.” That’s just the best way to express their personal commitment to their principles.
Some host podcasts. Others write books, or freelance, or create media archives. A few continue working with TV Rain as it hops around the world before landing in Amsterdam. One gives up journalism and joins the Ukrainian army. Another covers Donald Trump’s reelection for the BBC.
The latter, blonde and blue-eyed, describes herself as a “honey trap for Trumpies,” and her response to her interviews with MAGA voters makes the implications of Part I into text: She’s seen and heard all this rhetoric before, and it’s why she’s no longer allowed back in Russia. It’s why the FSB poisons one of the subjects in Berlin, making good on a threat to kill her if she attempted to cover the war up close, in the same fashion as Navalny when he was dosed with a nerve agent in 2020. It’s why the intelligence service threatens two other subjects in Prague before deploying an “activist” to befriend them who turns out to be a police informant. It’s why another is sentenced in absentia to years in prison, now under threat of extradition if she enters the wrong nation. It’s why the woman who survives the poisoning tells an audience, at a reading for the book she completed while recovering, to stay alarmed and be hysterical. “It’s very easy to lose your country,” she says.
Variations on this have become a common refrain in many countries whose governments have slipped further towards fascism. The enormity of that impending loss and the helplessness that accompanies it spreads disillusion among even the most committed members of the opposition. It’s also why the uphill battle of My Undesirable Friends, and especially Exile, is such a gripping achievement: Over the years, concentrated into hours, the familiar question of “What is to be done?” is infused with new meaning and answered over and over again. The years-long journey with these forced nomads ends with text explaining that “by the time you see this, they may be somewhere else.” But it also leaves us with a more powerful, unspoken idea: This hasn’t stopped any of them.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.