There’s something almost surreal about watching history unfold in real time, especially when the people at the center of it are as sharp, funny, and human as the journalists in “My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow.” What director Julia Loktev captures here isn’t just a documentary, but a front row seat to the final moments of a fragile freedom.
Loktev arrives in Moscow in 2021 intending to document independent journalists being branded “foreign agents” by Putin’s regime. What she ends up filming is the collapse of independent media in Russia, culminating in the first week of the full scale invasion of Ukraine. That sense of timing gives the film an unbearable tension because you know what’s coming, but the subjects are still living in the before.
At the heart of the film is a tight knit group of young women journalists including Loktev’s friend Anna Nemzer, who is working at TV Rain, the country’s last major independent news outlet at the time. They’re not portrayed as distant heroes, but as fully dimensional people. These women are quick-witted, exhausted, scared, and often very funny. That humor becomes a kind of quiet resistance that’s a way for these reporters to hold onto humanity as the ground shifts beneath them.
Structurally, the five chapter format gives the film the sweep of a Russian novel but also the immediacy of a reality show. The stakes are terrifyingly real. Careers vanish overnight. Laws change mid-broadcast. The word “war” itself becomes dangerous to say out loud. And yet, the cameras keep rolling, and so do they.
What’s most striking is how immersive the experience feels. Loktev’s observational style drops you directly into highly urgent and personal spaces. From the newsrooms, apartments, and online group chats, she captures life in a cinema vérité style. You feel the pressure, the moral weight, and the constant recalibration between truth-telling and self-preservation. Despite its over five hour runtime, the documentary rarely drag. If anything, it moves with the anxious momentum of breaking news.
And then there’s the emotional undercurrent that makes the movie unexpectedly hopeful. The friendships here are genuine and bonded. Even as independent media is dismantled and these journalists are forced into exile, their solidarity endures. That’s where the film’s quiet optimism lives.
As a document of a country sliding toward authoritarianism, “My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow” certainly is chilling. For anyone interested in media, politics, or simply what courage looks like in practice, this film feels essential.
By: Louisa Moore
Screen Zealots 