Filmmaker Julia Loktev on Her Jaw-Dropping Documentary About Russian Journalists on the Edge of Exile

I think that’s exactly what allowed me to tell the story the way I did, in this super-intimate way. The people I’m filming are all journalists, but I’m not a journalist. I’m not a giver of information in my films; I’m a storyteller. I approached My Undesirable Friends the way I would a fiction film—in the sense that, instinctively, my impulse is to show people living their lives, to show them feeling their emotions in the settings where we actually live—at work, at home, on the way from work to home and back—and to film people in close-up, to capture faces the way you would actors’, except they’re going through something incredibly real.

The documentary does feel so cinematic, and I loved your choice to show people at home with their kids, which feels so familiar to my experience of contemporary Russian activism being really intergenerational.

Absolutely. Home is where people gather; they gather in each other’s kitchens, and there’s such a community of going to your friends’ houses and working together that spills into sitting around and talking together at night in a kitchen. I wanted to capture all the life around everything and give the sense of a place and a world that has disappeared or been dispersed in exile.

What surprised you most during the making of this film?

Well, there’s the big answer and then there’s the little answer. Obviously, all of us were shocked by the full-scale war. Russia had invaded Ukraine in 2014, and the war had been going on for almost eight years, but it was a level of war that, strangely, the world had gotten used to enough for Russia to host a World Cup in the meantime. The kind of war that Russia started on February 24, 2022—and that’s been going now for four unimaginable years—though… nobody could really believe that could happen. No matter how much people say it’s coming, it’s going to happen, you’re still in this state of absolute shock when it happens.

Up until that point, the film’s first chapter was going to be called The Lives of Foreign Agents, and until the moment when Russia started this horrific, criminal war in Ukraine, it was going to be a film about these journalists who’d been named foreign agents who were trying to figure out: How long can we keep working in our country? Is the time to leave tomorrow, or was it yesterday? How do we face all these crackdowns? How do we keep working and keep living?

And then everything changed when Russia invaded Ukraine, because they shut down all independent media, and all the journalists were asking themselves: How do we report for one more day? How do we report when they’re telling us we can’t call it a war? How do we report on Russians bombing apartment buildings, with the Ministry of Defense claiming that they’re not hitting any civilian targets, when you’re clearly showing that they are? All of them faced that decision of, like, do we go to the airport? Or do we go to work? The decision was clear: go to the airport, because if you stay and work another day, you might go to jail, and you won’t be useful as a journalist, so they all flood into exile.