“When the screws tighten in real time, you don’t really notice it.”: Julia Loktev on My Undesirable Friends: Part One — Last Air in Moscow

Before she debuted her documentary My Undesirable Friends, Russian-American director Julia Loktev was better known for her fiction features, such as the New York crime thriller Day Night Day Night (2006) and The Loneliest Planet (2011), a slow-burn hiking movie starring Gael Garcia-Bernal. Split in two parts, My Undesirable Friends follows several journalists in independent Russian media at the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Branded ‘foreign agents’, they are forced into exile. Loktev’s approach is direct – she is present, but mostly invisible, as she captures the day to day lives of Anna Nemzer, Ksenia Mironova, Sonya Groysman, Olga Churakova, Irina Dolinina, and Alesya Marokhovskaya. They share stories of raids, trials, arrests, and the cost of their work. There is no crew, no script – just an iPhone and a microphone. 

The film cuts the distance between the spectator and the film’s courageous protagonists with Loktev serving as a proxy for the audience. In documenting the clamping down on journalistic freedom and people’s lives, My Undesirable Friends: Part One — Last Air in Moscow asks that you bear witness. 

At the time of our interview, Loktev was in the final stages of editing My Undesirable Friends: Part Two – Exile, which was a welcome opportunity to reflect on Part One, from the distance of time and global political upheaval. 

While we’re about to discuss Part One of your film, I hear you’re editing Part Two. Where are you at in the process?

We’re getting really close to finishing the second part [Exile], there is one more scene to shoot. It’s hard to admit because I’ve spent the past four and a half years with these characters and following them in exile, so it’s difficult to imagine what my life will be like when I’m not living with them every day, on my screen and in person. It’s been an incredible honour for me to just be able to spend time with them. 

It is an act of generosity on their part to have let you in, and by proxy, us. Documentary filmmaking can be exposing, but also revelatory.

One of the things people have said that has meant the most to us, is that this is a film about love. I have heard it described as a love story because it’s about different kinds of love – between people, in a community, love for your work. Hopefully that’s what people come away feeling after watching it. 

Well, when all fails, maybe all you have left is love and community. Regardless of whether you’re accomplishing the results you hoped for, you just keep getting up the next morning and doing your job, while sticking to others. I don’t know if hope or belief in the future is the right term, though, because it’s about continuing to work when it doesn’t feel very hopeful at all. 

With its present continuous tense, your film is a record of how it felt to live in Russia when political opposition was still possible. Unlike the second-hand memory of Soviet times, you contribute to a different kind of history-making.

Of course, how a nation understands its present and how it creates its future is related to how it tells the story of its past; what is obliterated, what is forgotten, and what is highlighted. Most of our characters were born in the 1990s and started school when Putin came to power. Ever since they were young, there’s been a constant encroachment of history, and then of course, there’s the way Russia uses history – like making a cult out of World War II. Only a few weeks ago, the former Gulag History Museum in Moscow was repurposed into a Museum of the Nazi crimes in WWII and the oppression of the Soviet people.

At one point in the film, an NGO called Memorial is being shut down. The judge ruling over the NGO’s closure states it doesn’t want to talk about “the unpleasant things in our history”, like political repression “when we won World War II.” 

We hear this constantly in the States, like with Trump and the Smithsonian, it’s a current not only in Russia. While it honestly wasn’t my intent to make a film that was so relatable today, somehow the world caught up with me. 

In addition to safety, why was it important to shoot the film alone, without a crew? 

I was brought in by someone trusted in the community [journalist and co-director Anna Nemzer] and it was surprising just how quickly everyone opened up to me and showed me such hospitality. There was also the feeling that with so much going on, it’s harder to care if there was a camera or not. I do try to frame as I’m shooting, so I shoot very consciously and in a focused way, especially faces in close-up. What I’m interested in is people’s emotions, so shooting on an iPhone made it feel organic.

Was the iPhone you were shooting on your own?

I just used my old iPhone X at first, then I upgraded to a second, newer phone when I realised that having WiFi on and receiving texts could interfere with the sound. I had microphones on everyone, but I didn’t want the camera to be too big, so I didn’t have a cage: I’d just stick my elbows in my stomach to steady the shot. I was physically the same distance from them as I would be if I was hanging out with my friends. It’s not really the “fly on the wall” kind of method, rather a “fly on your lap!” I embraced it and followed the advice of [American investigative journalist] Bob Woodward, who said that the best thing you can do is shut up. I was physically close, but very, very quiet. Obviously it’s the way therapists work, not saying much and other people fill the space. At the same time, I didn’t want to erase myself, nor make myself present because it’s not about me. Hopefully, the camera becomes an invitation for you to become the friend visiting these people too.

What were the logistics of the shoot – were you on the ground in Moscow during those four months, or did you make separate trips?

Each chapter, with the exception of the last two in the first week of the full-scale war, is its own visit. In hindsight, I could see how this was a wise choice to make, because when the screws tighten in real time, you don’t really notice it. But coming every few weeks, a month apart, you see the changes in the atmosphere. With the political situation, a month made such a difference that it felt like arriving in a different place. It’s really over the course of four and a half months that everything drastically changes. The journalists are being named foreign agents and they think there’s going to be a crackdown, aimed at them. They don’t know this is preparation for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

What were the practical dimensions of your duty of care for your characters, during and after the shoot? 

I’m really glad you asked this question because the topic of accountability is not discussed enough. For me, it was important because all of our characters were living at risk, as well as the people around them, so I wanted to make sure I didn’t put anyone else at more risk than they already were. There’s the journalists for whom the most risky thing they do is their work every day, but there’s also the people behind the scenes you have to protect – there are technicians and make-up artists who maybe wouldn’t want to be public in that way. Instead of getting permission prior to shooting, I retroactively asked every single person who appears in the frame to review their footage, accept their inclusion or ask to be blurred. It’s more important to protect people than it is to get something on screen. I see it as my obligation to honour the people who shared their stories by protecting everyone, so I still send everyone their scenes and bits for review after finishing each chapter of the film as I’m working on the second part, Exile.

► My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow is now streaming. My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile is screening at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival on 14 and 15 October.