In 2021, New York-based Russian American filmmaker Julia Loktev went back to Russia to begin what turned out to be a truly epic documentary production. She was in Moscow to make a documentary about journalists who had been classified as “foreign agents” or “undesirable” by Vladimir Putin’s government. Then Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2024. The 324-minute “My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow” premiered in 2024, following the journalists, most of them young women and many working at Russia’s youth-oriented TV Rain, through the first days of the war, right before they all decide to flee the country for their safety.

“My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile,” which had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival in September, picks up immediately following those events, with all the characters now scattered across Europe and the Middle East in whichever countries will have them, attempting to regroup and come to terms with what it means to be journalists in exile. Across nearly six hours, the second film has the journalists reckoning with a sense of failure over their work back home, while trying to find ways of keeping the reporting going, including reestablishing TV Rain, first in Latvia, and then after some controversy in the Netherlands. Others go freelance and some move around, ending up in Ukraine, the United States and elsewhere. All the while, the characters navigate questions of their status as Russians internationally, maintaining connections with family back home, and the efficacy of journalism itself.

I sat down with Loktev to talk about the second part of her documentary epic, the necessity of journalism, the twisted logic of authoritarianism, maintaining some hope in a dark world and what it would take for her to make a Part III.

Truthdig: This feels, in many ways, like a film about failure.

Julia Loktev: I think the film is largely about just keeping going when you might not have reached your goal. You didn’t overthrow Putin. You didn’t kill Putin. You didn’t stop the war, and you still haven’t stopped the war every day, but how do you do the best you can every day? I think that’s an incredibly inspiring lesson for all of us, because you might not be achieving the goal you hope to achieve. We haven’t gotten rid of [Donald] Trump yet, and yet how do you get up and not stop paying attention, not stop doing what you can and not just not sit down in a puddle and give up?

This is a film about all these Russian journalists who were working in Russia as Russia was turning increasingly authoritarian. They could see the writing on the wall, but yet they couldn’t imagine just how far it would go. They could not imagine that their country would invade the neighboring country, Ukraine, and start a full-scale war that’s now been going for 4½ years. And they were all continuing to work in Russia. In “Last Air in Moscow,” we capture them in the last days before the window closed. It was still possible to work in Russia and speak the truth, even as their offices were being searched, were being bugged, even as they lived in constant fear of arrest, even as they were being named foreign agents, even as their media were starting to be named “undesirable” organizations. This had just started. That’s where the name comes from. It means that it’s a criminal organization in Russia, and they were all still trying to work in Russia and do the best they can. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and they all felt a tremendous sense of failure, shame, horror that they didn’t stop it, that they couldn’t stop it. There just weren’t enough of them, is the bottom line. They did the best they could, they did everything they could, and yet this war is still going.

Shame is interesting to me, because it’s very present throughout the film. These journalists who, on the one hand, are proud of their work, but they’re also a bit ashamed of their failure.

Their fundamental shame is the shame for the criminal acts of their country.

Right.

They are ashamed that they carry the passports of this country that is waging a criminal war. But of course, at some point, shame only goes so far. Ultimately, action is much more important because shame can be paralyzing, and none of these characters are paralyzed. What matters is what are you doing now? Are you doing the best you can now?

“Most of them have now been sentenced to prison in Russia.”

All of these journalists have been forced to leave Russia because if they tried to say the word “war” in Russia, they would be arrested. You can’t report on the war in Russia because Russia calls it a “special military operation.” You can’t speak about Russia’s war crimes in Russia. If you want to deliver the news to Russians about Russia’s war crimes, you have to be working outside the country. So all of them have given up their homeland. It sounds very abstract. “Give up your homeland,” but what does that mean? It means you can’t report on the ground in the country that you’re reporting on. You can’t interview people, and often, you know, they have to. You can’t interview people on the ground. Also, most of these media are “undesirable” organizations, criminal organizations. It means giving them an interview is a crime, so they have to find ways to continue working. So being a journalist becomes infinitely more difficult.

Most of them have now been sentenced to prison in Russia, which means that they can’t step foot in Russia because they will be arrested. But they also can’t step foot in about 50% of the world that will extradite them to Russia, including countries you don’t think of: India, Vietnam, Turkey. Some of the countries they actually passed through in exile. Once you’re sentenced, you can’t go there. They’ve been legally declared “extremist terrorists” in Russia. They’ve been followed and threatened in Europe. You feel like you’re always looking over your shoulder. But it also means things for your personal life. It means that if your parents back in Russia get sick, you can’t go be by their deathbed. You’ve completely lost a sense of home, of identity. The film is largely about that, because exile is something that penetrates every aspect of your life. It’s made up of kids growing up and marriages falling apart and people falling in love. They’re moving from country to country to country, and it takes place over 12 countries. You go to work, you do your work, you’re trying to do the best job you can and continue to work as a journalist, but meanwhile it penetrates every part of your life.

I think what I was most struck by in the film were some of the conversations with family back home, who, in various ways, either defend what’s happening or try to soft-pedal it. Can you talk about capturing what were obviously very difficult conversations?

Obviously, their parents are of a different generation. They have different degrees of feelings about the war. Some people obviously are opposed to it, but you’re not going to say that openly over a call from Russia, because this is a country where you could be arrested for a phone call.

Of course.

Other parents are worried about their kids and just want them to shut up because they don’t want them threatened and arrested and thrown in prison or killed. Other parents — I don’t think anyone openly, enthusiastically supports the war. As one of the characters, Lera, said, nobody likes a war, but many people in Russia feel that you should stay out of politics. There’s this beautiful thing that Alesya, another one of the characters, says, that Putin’s propaganda wasn’t designed to make you believe Putin. It was designed to make you believe nothing at all. If you don’t believe anything, you don’t do anything. And that’s largely how Putin’s Russia is. It’s unseemly to get into politics. You shouldn’t stick your nose in politics. You shouldn’t talk about politics. You shouldn’t get involved. You should leave politics to the big boys, or to the one big boy, Putin, and live your nice, normal, private life. And I think for a lot of people, their parents, maybe they watch propaganda TV, maybe they don’t, but they don’t quite understand.

What she was talking about in that scene was what you’re saying, but it was also about the unstable reality created under an authoritarian regime, and the fact that because people don’t know what’s true or not true, it’s easier to disconnect.

Absolutely. We hear this in the States now all the time. “Well, how do we really know? We don’t know the truth. You know, who’s to say?” These things do sound very familiar.

In the movie, the characters have conversations about what it even means to be a journalist and what the value of journalism is. Especially in the context of not having prevented the war. Did you come to a different understanding of the value of journalism making the film?

I don’t think so. Actually, one of the characters makes a decision that being a journalist is not enough, and he has to do more. And he talked about this at the Venice press conference because, as a journalist, you’re often describing reality and not changing it. There is this question about activism and journalism, but also they can report for years about Putin’s crimes and war crimes, and yet Putin remains in power. So if that’s the benchmark you’re using, did we overthrow Putin? They all feel like, “Oh, my goodness, we have failed.” you know. And he says, “Well, you know, you’re not changing this reality, but if you stop reporting, I think you will see how quickly the reality changes.” It’s sometimes hard to see. That’s ultimately the effect.

“As a journalist, you’re often describing reality and not changing it.”

One of my favorite scenes is with Lera, and she’s this 22-year-old TV Rain anchor when we started filming her. In this film we start in exile with her. She’s just trying to find a hotel room in Turkey. She’s left her country two days before. She woke up at 2 in the morning to a text message saying go to the airport. She’s trying to report again. She says, “I had a job, I had a boyfriend, I had a home, and now I’m some loser in Istanbul.” Slowly, we watch her get back on TV Rain, and watch Rain get back on their feet. But she’s still incredibly young, and there’s this scene where she’s in the back of a cab, and she’s talking about her dreams, and it sounds like the way we’re used to young women discussing their wedding, in a kind of comical way. Her dream is reporting on Putin in The Hague. She starts describing it, and she’s like, “Well, the studio will be glass, and I’ll be going in and out, and I’ll be doing this.” I mean, she’s one step away from describing her outfit. She talks about it in these dreamy terms, and of course, that’s not likely to come to pass. To watch this very young woman work day after day, because ideally she’d love to see Putin in The Hague. That’s the dream.

To the degree that anybody finds consolation in the work beyond just the process of it, a couple of people voice the idea that essentially they’re providing some comfort for the people who do tune in back in Russia. Even if it’s not enough people to overthrow the government, those people still need some kind of spiritual and ideological maintenance.

I think that’s a really amazing point in the movie. I was raising funds for this film, and this is a couple months after Trump ’s election, and it was an American granter, and they asked me, “How are you going to reach across the aisle and reach Republican audiences, so it’s not preaching to the choir?” And I’m like, “The choir is in need of some preaching!” We have this idea that our work should be to somehow win over people who are super-convinced of the other opinion, and that’s not necessarily the only goal.

One of the characters in the film, Edik, he says it’s not about winning over some majority. It is about giving strength to some theoretical minority, and an invisible middle ground of people who might not have clear positions. But there is something really important about preaching to the choir, because attrition is real, and giving up is real. I was talking to a publicist the other day, and she said, “I’m having a hard time getting people to watch this film because people say they’re tired of talking about press freedoms and authoritarianism,” and my jaw dropped, and I was like, “That’s real, you know. Because people are tired of the war, they’re tired of authoritarianism.” But you know what? Authoritarianism is not tired of you, and that’s exactly how it works. We normalize everything. We normalize genocide, we normalize war, we normalize Trump. And because you can’t tell the same story day after day, we normalize deportations. And actually, to me, that’s the most interesting story: How do you not normalize? How do you keep doing the work day after day?

Some characters in the film eventually settle in the U.S. and we see them even reporting, talking to Republicans happy about Trump’s reelection. And of course the parallels to Russia are very clear in that case, although obviously not as extreme and also contextually different.

You know, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But yeah, parallels.

How did you find the characters in the movie, beyond what we see in the film, reacted to what’s going on in the States?

I think it’s startling and terrifying for them to see the same thing happening. Ksyusha talks about growing up in Russia during the Obama era. She was in New York studying at the New York Film Academy and said she wanted to go film on the streets and in bars in D.C. during the inauguration, which I will be honest is really the last place I wanted to be on Inauguration Day, surrounded by very, very happy people. But I was like, “OK, I have to go. She’s going to film there. I have to go film her talking to a guy in a bar talking about post-birth abortions.” She speaks about being in Russia during the Obama era, being a kid there and thinking, “Well, in Russia everything’s sliding straight to hell, but in America at least it’s different, and things are giving us optimism.” So for the protagonists that moved to the States, it’s a strange echo.

“What exactly are you afraid of? It’s important to name the fear.”

Lena said a beautiful thing. She was talking to a ProPublica journalist, and the journalist said, “People are afraid to talk to me, and I’m afraid.” And Lena, who’s been arrested God knows how many times in Russia for protesting as an out lesbian and who also has a criminal case against her in Russia, said, “What exactly are you afraid of? It’s important to name the fear because the way authoritarianism works is the fear is amorphous. What is it that will happen to you?”

Can you also talk about the epicness of the production? And I don’t just mean the length, but like you said, you filmed in 12 different countries. I think even Christopher Nolan only dreams of filming a movie in 12 countries.

Filmed by one person! Without a crew! I was incredibly lucky as a filmmaker. I started this project filming in Russia when Russia had just named 25 or so individuals as foreign agents. Nobody expected a full-scale war to come, and as a result I ended up being in Russia when the war started, when it shut down all independent media, when all the characters fled the country, and following them live, in exile. We think of historic moments when populations fled into sudden political exile. It’s happened repeatedly, and Russia’s turn to full-on fascism — I will say that word because the Russia of today is not the Russia of five years ago, absolutely not, it’s a huge shift — is one of the defining events certainly of this part of the century. A million people leaving, fleeing into exile. Most of Russian civil society, most Russian journalists, most of the people who were trying to create a different Russia suddenly, on a moment’s notice, fleeing is a really huge, historic shift, and the fact that I was able to capture this through these — I have to say — very lovable, funny, sharp people who crack jokes in the darkest darkness. I mean, we’re talking about all these serious issues, but that’s not all of it. You think it’s going to be a bunch of people giving you dry interviews, but it’s actually people hanging out and vaping in their kitchen and being with their children and their lovers and living life as they continue to try to do the work. And it’s actually a remarkably, I think, funny film, given the subject.

I’m looking forward to the next one.

Well, that involves Putin dying. We’re talking about making Part III, but Putin has to die for that. So I’m just looking forward to things changing in Russia, but I’m not holding my breath either.

The post The Essential Work of Russian ‘Undesirables’ appeared first on Truthdig .