Reality Show: Julia Loktev on ‘My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow’

It’s been a while since the acclaimed director-screenwriter-video artist Julia Loktev (The Loneliest Planet, Day Night Day Night) last traversed the nonfiction landscape with her 1998 feature debut Moment of Impact. That Sundance Documentary Directing Award-winning doc, shot on Hi8 and edited by Loktev herself, dealt with the aftermath of an accident that left her father severely disabled and forced her mother to give up her career as a computer programmer in order to care for him. It was yet another life-changing event for the Russian immigrant couple who, along with their young daughter, traded Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) for northern Colorado.

And now Loktev returns to her roots in more ways than one, with an epic doc titled My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow (part two is yet to be released). Unspooling in five discrete chapters, the film brings Loktev back to familiar territory to tag along with her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk show journalist for TV Rain, and her fellow “foreign agents,” who are also independent media makers branded such by the Kremlin. They navigate the ever-twisting reality of dictatorship in the run-up to and aftermath of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

A few weeks prior to the NYFF premiere of My Undesirable Friends, Documentary reached out to Loktev to learn all about the project. The IDA Enterprise Fund grantee will be screening both in two parts and in full in early October. This interview has been edited.

DOCUMENTARY: At the beginning of the doc we learn you went to Moscow four months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to make a film with your friend Anya Nemzer. How do you know Anya and what was your initial idea for the project?

JULIA LOKTEV: I’m originally from St. Petersburg but I’ve never been a citizen of the Russian Federation. I left the Soviet Union when I was nine years old, though I’ve gone to Russia several times and knew several people there. Anya was a friend just socially before this. In summer of 2021, when Russia started naming a few media and individual journalists "foreign agents”—the law had been on the books for a long time but they started applying it strangely that summer. There was this article in the New York Times about Russian journalists being named foreign agents and fighting back with humor. I read about these two amazing girls, Sonya Groysman and Olya Churakova, the type of young women you could meet in Brooklyn, and each one of them had independently been declared a source of mass media foreign agent. They’d started a podcast called Hello, You Are a Foreign Agent .

To me, the idea of a society marking people as other, or forcing them to mark themselves as other, was incredibly disturbing and interesting. Of course there’s a history of this, we know where that goes, in a way. As foreign agents, they had to mark everything they put in public with a long legal disclaimer that had to be in a type larger than anything else on the page essentially saying, “This was brought to you by a foreign agent,” in much more legalistic language.

So this would have to go not only on their articles, announced at the top in all caps, but it would also have to be put on their Instagram vacation pictures or comments on a friend’s wedding on Facebook. Everyone had a feeling that something was happening to them. That’s what the initial idea for the film was. The first chapter is called “The Lives of the Foreign Agents.” 

At the time, all the journalists were trying to determine how long they could continue. How long do you keep working in your country and trying to make it better? Which is what all of them were doing. They were all opposed to the Putin regime. They were all reporting on Russia for people who were trying to speak truth to power under a society that was becoming increasingly totalitarian. And one of the things that comes out in the film is it wasn’t always like this. All of them, to different degrees, have a memory of when Russia wasn’t this way. So how do you know when you’ve crossed over to the point where it’s too late? 

When we started filming, several of their offices had been searched, some of them were declared foreign agents, some were not, yet. Or maybe their media was declared a foreign agent but they individually hadn’t been. They lived in fear of a search at 2:00 a.m.. It was a very reasonable fear. And it was also a reasonable fear that possibly something worse could happen to you since there’s a history of journalists being killed in Russia. So they were all trying to figure out how long can they keep living in this society and trying to fight? And when is the time to leave? Tomorrow or was it yesterday?

D: I’m also curious to hear how and why you decided to place yourself in the film. Though you don’t appear onscreen your presence is always acknowledged, from Anya commenting on the look on your face to Sonya offering you food. Since you’re a stand-in for the viewer, it really creates an intimacy between your characters and the audience.

JL: That’s a really lovely observation. I’m glad that’s how you felt. But, honestly, there was absolutely no plan. I read about these women. I thought it was interesting. I talked to Anya. At the time there were about 25 mass media foreign agents, so we had a Zoom meeting with a number of them and I said, “I want to make this movie and I want to involve you in some way as collaborators. If I know what the film’s about, I feel there’s no need to make it. We don’t know.” And they said, “Okay, we’re game.” And most of the people on that Zoom call ended up characters in the film. I didn’t know anyone other than Anya. Anya introduced me on that first trip.

So in October ’21, when Russia started giving out visas after COVID-19, I just jumped on a plane and thought, “I’m just going to go and meet people, see how it goes.” I was told you’re supposed to meet your characters before and hang out with them. I was also going to talk to a couple of cinematographers. I thought, we’ll do some tests. That’ll be research. 

I think the first night I arrived, Dmitry Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, received the Nobel Peace Prize. That night Anya was having a bunch of people over at her house, and I just arrived with a borrowed camera. I was going to have the cinematographer come and shoot but Anya said, “We don’t really know him. You’re our friend. We feel more comfortable. Can you just shoot it?” So I borrowed his Lumix. But since I don’t shoot with that camera and couldn’t figure out his follow focus, I picked up my iPhone, which at that point was a four-year-old iPhone 10. And Anya’s husband, a podcast producer, had a mic, so I put that on the table, just started shooting and never looked back.

There was no plan. The only thing I knew was that there wouldn’t be formal interviews. I didn’t want to do that. I was just responding to people. We had this incredible immediate intimacy and warmth and connection. They were very open with me, I think in part because I didn’t come with a crew. I didn’t come with a big camera. I speak native Russian.  I just hoped that by the time we were editing it felt like you went to visit your brilliant friend in Moscow, and then she introduced you to all these other amazing people; and you’re just hanging out with them in kitchens, in taxis, living through all of this with them. This awful historic moment as their society turns completely into totalitarianism, and you’re really just hanging out. For a film about political repression in a cold place, that’s quite warm.

D: So what precautions did you take to ensure your own safety? Honestly, I’m surprised you stayed in Moscow for as long as you did.

JL: I was actually going back and forth in the fall and in the winter. I was there for the first week of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. I arrived the night before and stayed there as the U.S. Embassy was telling Americans to get out. I didn’t have press accreditation, so I just tried to keep a low profile. 

I was staying in a place where every time we came out of our hotel there was a wall of special forces in helmets looking like—the Russians call them the cosmonauts—looking like astronauts with these crazy helmets. There was a wall of police vans just waiting to arrest people. But I mean, listen, it’s nothing like the dangers the journalists are facing themselves, so I don’t think that’s an important part of that story. Brittney Griner was arrested during that first week so I can’t pretend it didn’t cross my mind, but I just think that, ultimately, the risks that the people in my film take are much greater than any risk I took.

D: Are you now working on a sequel?

JL: I thought I was making a feature film when I started, and then history took over and it became what I think will ultimately be a 10-hour epic. So yes, there’s going to be a part two in exile where it follows them from the moment they start buying the only plane tickets left. When the invasion happened, most countries stopped airline service from Russia, so you couldn’t fly to Europe, you couldn’t fly to the States. You could only buy a ticket to Turkey, to Mongolia. People were going anywhere they could.

All of them are extremely opposed to the war, and the second half really becomes about what it is to take responsibility. What does it mean to be accountable? None of them feel they can wash their hands of the actions of the Russian government even though they were opposed to it. So I’m really excited about getting into editing that.

D: You’re going to screen it as a 10-part docuseries? Or will it be playing in a multipart format like you’re doing at New York Film Festival? How do you envision this?

JL: Somebody asked me, “Is it a documentary epic or is it a series?” I’m like, “Does it have to be one or the other?” In other words, I think you can experience it as a series, but I think you can also experience it as an epic film broken up the way we’re showing it at the New York Film Festival. These categories that we get into, I’m just not sure what they mean.

That said, I think that the way it’s structured some characters come to the foreground and kind of lead one episode. So I think something like Mad Men, for example, in a series format where you kind of focus more on one character and their story comes to the center stage is possible.

D: What was the editing process actually like? How much footage were you dealing with?

JL: Let me just say that fiction and nonfiction is a category distinction that I don’t really believe in. I’ve done both. Together with Michael Taylor, who I’ve worked with on fiction films, we structured it in scenes because it’s so character-focused. Editing this has really been like going back to the most refreshing film school, one which forces you to study and see what’s important in the footage and not impose something on it—to let it emerge.

There’s hundreds of hours of footage. Each chapter is a moment in time. But we basically looked for what each scene means and what’s important. I remember at one point Michael said something like, “I’m just approaching it like they’re fiction characters. Where do I feel them?” Though I do most of the fine-cut editing myself, it’s important for me to have a real collaborator to think with. And Michael is great in that way.

Every few months we had these test screenings at my house as we were working on it. We would finish an episode and have a bunch of friends, and friends of friends, come over and watch it. I think of the characters as really people who are very legible to us and who make sense to us, living in a society that is starting to really not make sense to them, and certainly doesn’t make sense to us, where rules aren’t predictable. I noticed, for example, at our first chapter screening that some people who lived in what they assumed to be the safety of democracy all their lives, were like, “But we want to understand, why exactly were they named foreign agents?” And then everyone else that had spent time in places where you can’t necessarily expect that logic said, “That’s the point.”

D: They don’t know.

JL: Exactly. For terror to work it has to be unpredictable and random. It’s not like Russia started naming the most famous journalists foreign agents. Some of the most famous journalists still aren’t foreign agents. It doesn’t work in a logical way. So I think it’s about something much larger that I hope will not become too familiar too soon here. I think there’s a lot of things about a kind of predictable democracy that we take for granted.

I also think it’s sort of exciting to be premiering it now. I’ve been told it has “reality show vibes,” but I’m like, “Yeah, but it’s like a reality show about an actual meaningful reality happening to these people.” I’ve just been incredibly honored that they have all let me into their lives and become my very, very desirable friends.

Lauren Wissot is a film critic and journalist, filmmaker and programmer, and a contributing editor at both Filmmaker magazine and Documentary magazine. She also writes regularly for Modern Times Review (The European Documentary Magazine) and has served as the director of programming at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival.