The first draft of history

Julia Loktev discusses her critically acclaimed documentary about Russian journalists being branded foreign agents

With a running time of well over five hours and no score or voiceover, My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow always looked set to be a challenging documentary to promote and distribute internationally. Nevertheless, this story of young female Russian journalists being branded “foreign agents” by their own government in the run-up to the war in Ukraine has proven to be a critics’ favourite and narrowly missed out on an Oscar nomination last week.

Novaya Gazeta Europe spoke with the film’s Russian-American director Julia Loktev about her decades-long relationship with her homeland, making the film during an era of great political turbulence, and how the events of the past year in the United States have allowed American audiences to see a new relevance in the documentary’s subject matter.

NGE: Julia, could you tell us about being simultaneously the director, producer and DOP on this film?

Julia Loktev

director

JL: Yes, I shot the film on my own in Moscow, without a crew. I did the camerawork, recorded sound, and was also the director and producer too. But, of course, I had huge help from co-director Anna Nemzer, who was also one of the contributors, without whom there would be no film. My co-producer Michael Taylor and I did the editing. It was important for me to engage with someone who didn’t know and understand Russia the way I do. I left Leningrad when I was 9. Russian is my mother tongue, I still speak it with my mother, and I understand a lot, but even I need to have a lot of what is happening in Russia explained to me now. Michael, on the other hand, knows nothing about Russia, and so he could tell me what my audience wouldn’t understand.

NGE: Your family left the Soviet Union in 1978. How and when did you next come to Russia?

JL: After graduating from university in Canada, I decided to go to Central Asia, and thought I’d visit my homeland on the same trip. I went on a five-month solo trip through Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

NGE: What year was that?

JL: This was 1991, I was 22. There were no tourists back then at all, and nobody understood me when I said I was just travelling, so I started telling people I was studying the influence of the Arabic script on Timurid architecture. And then I spent a few more months in Russia and arrived right in the middle of the collapse of the Soviet Union. I always time things just right.

NGE: You saw Russia evolve between 1991 and 2022. What was the country like?

JL: I didn’t visit Russia that often. But each time I saw a different country. The early 2000s, 2008, 2014, then the 2020s... Russia looked completely different every time.

NGE: When did you meet the people you decided to follow in your film?

JL: In those last years before the full-scale war, I had a circle of friends and acquaintances in Russia consisting of activists and journalists. An important part of this circle was Anna Nemzer. When I decided to make the film, the first thing I did was get in touch with Anna, and she became a co-director and guided me through that world. She knew all the people we ended up filming and introduced me to them. As Anna had introduced us, they trusted me, and that was very important.

I knew the film needed to be about people who were still in the country.

NGE: Your stars are young, beautiful, talented women. Was that deliberate?

JL: I’m very glad it turned out that way, though that was never my intention. When I started shooting, there were only 25 journalists on the list of “foreign agents”. It’s hard to believe that now! In the end there were several journalists for me to choose from, some of whom were men. I even started filming some of them but in the fall of 2021 they all had to leave the country as others were having their homes searched and it had become dangerous for them to remain in Russia. I knew the film needed to be about people who were still in the country.

NGE: Your film lasts over five hours. Isn’t that a problem for the audience?

JL: There was a very funny discussion on Twitter where critics were saying: “Ideally, a film should last an hour and a half.” That’s the theory, in any case. And one critic from Variety, who gave a really nice review of our film, said the film easily held the viewer’s interest. I understood that if you want to live people’s emotions and lives, it takes time. You fall in love with the characters and want to spend time with them, understand them and experience the high and lows with them.

NGE: The film was shot on an iPhone, so the stars are literally at arm’s length. It creates a feeling of intimacy, like you’ve known these people for years.

JL: I am always interested in people, their faces, their emotions, their lives. I instinctively film people close-up because I want to get close to them. If you can get close to someone, why be far away? I was at the same distance from our protagonists as one usually is from friends. And My Undesirable Friends is a warm, friendly title, because I think it reflects the movie, and many overseas viewers have told me they felt like the stars were their friends too.

NGE: Now that it’s awards season, there have been a number of special screenings of the film. What does that mean to you?

JL: It’s amazing. Baryshnikov watched our film from start to finish and then awarded us the New York Film Critics Circle Best Non-Fiction Award. We tried not to faint right there on stage, which was very difficult as we obviously have incredible respect for him. It’s hard to think of a more incredible dream coming true. Then Meryl Streep watched the documentary and asked us what she could do to help — she later introduced one screening of our film.

Through their eyes, audiences can understand what has forced so many people who oppose this terrible war to leave the country.

NGE: The film has been shown in various countries. Do you think it has helped international audiences gain a greater understanding of what’s happening in Russia?

JL: I think it has, because people connect with our subjects, they understand them, and through them they begin to better understand both what has happened and what is still happening in Russia. Through their eyes, audiences can understand what has forced so many people who oppose this terrible war to leave the country. American viewers think the movie is about them. Critics there see the film and say: “God, this is us, this is about us!” Ksenia Mironova even joked: “Can we please let it be about us first, then about you?”

NGE: The parallels between what is happening in the US at the moment and what happened in Russia are obvious. How do you see things now that much of what you show in your film has now become reality in America?

JL: It’s terrible, and all very painful to watch, like a constant feeling of déjà vu. Of course, while there are differences to what happened in Russia, there are a lot of similarities too. I was just listening to the news and heard a journalist from The Washington Post had been searched. It’s very disturbing. The other day Trump described the actions of Renée Good, the woman killed in Minnesota, towards law enforcement as “pretty tough”. So for that we’re killing people now? I came to America when I was 9. I had all these lessons at school: what a beautiful constitution we have, how important the checks and balances are between Congress, the courts and the president. Of course we heard about Vietnam and the bad things too, but there was a belief that the system itself was good.

NGE: Many Russians, especially those who have been forced to leave Russia, think they haven’t done enough to resist the regime and prevent the war. Do Americans now feel the same way?

JL: I wish I had a clue how we could have prevented this! You have to do as much as you can while you still can: protest, speak out, don’t let yourself get inured to it, don’t allow yourself to normalise it.

NGE: What will the second part of your film be about?

JL: When the war in Ukraine began, all my protagonists left Russia within a week. But I kept on filming, as I realised it was a rare moment in history. I managed to catch the living story, through our subjects, and experience it through them. So my next film is My Undesirable Friends. Part II — Exile.