{"id":338697,"date":"2025-12-09T09:29:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T09:29:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/338697\/"},"modified":"2025-12-09T09:29:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T09:29:09","slug":"my-undesirable-friends-wins-3-awards-within-days-boosting-oscar-bid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/338697\/","title":{"rendered":"‘My Undesirable Friends’ Wins 3 Awards Within Days, Boosting Oscar Bid"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tJulia Loktev<\/a>\u2019s documentary My Undesirable Friends: Part I \u2013 Last Air in Moscow enters Oscar shortlist voting with incredible momentum. On Sunday, the film was named Best Documentary\/Nonfiction film by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association<\/a>, just days after it won Best Documentary Film at the Gotham Awards<\/a> and Best Non-Fiction Film at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, and earned a nomination for the Film Independent Spirit Awards<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tLoktev, who was born in the then-Soviet Union and immigrated to the U.S. at age 9, returned to Moscow in 2021 to make her film, which runs 5 hours and 24 minutes and is told in chapters. It was a fateful time to embark on a documentary about journalists dedicated to independent reporting in Putin\u2019s Russia; within a few months of Loktev\u2019s arrival, Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine and anyone who failed to toe the Kremlin line would soon find themselves a target of repression.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn fact, those who deviated from parroting Russian propaganda were branded \u201cundesirable\u201d (hence the film\u2019s title).<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201c\u2019Undesirable organization\u2019 is actually a legal classification in Russia,\u201d Loktev tells Deadline. \u201cRussia has now deemed almost all independent media as undesirable organizations along with many, many civil rights organizations, NGOs, educational institutions; things like Greenpeace have been declared undesirable organizations, a few universities like Bard College, Yale\u2026 The list of undesirable organizations grows every day, as does the list of extremists and terrorists. Russia has basically declared independent media to be undesirable, journalism to be undesirable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"'My<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u2018My Undesirable Friends: Part I \u2013 Last Air in Moscow\u2019<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tArgot Pictures\/Marminchilla<\/p>\n

\n\tThe filmmaker\u2019s \u201cundesirable friends\u201d include Anna Nemzer, talk show host at Russia\u2019s last independent news channel, TV Rain; Ksenia Mironova, a reporter at TV Rain, and Elena Kostyuchenko, a journalist at Novaya Gazeta who has been compared to Joan Didion.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s all a group of quite young, mostly women journalists who were working as independent journalists in Russia, which was possible to do in Russia in the fall of 2021, which is impossible to imagine now,\u201d Loktev notes. \u201cThe important thing for me about this film is it\u2019s about people. I\u2019ve made fiction and I\u2019ve made documentaries and I actually just make films about people, where you get to go through something with people that you come to know. And in this case, I was incredibly lucky that I got to capture history unfolding live.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a pure v\u00e9rit\u00e9 film, meaning it\u2019s observational, following the characters as the noose of censorship tightens around their necks. Moments of levity early in the film, as when the protagonists engage in gallows humor, become increasingly rare as the Kremlin cracks down on independent news media and scattered anti-war demonstrations in the streets.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSometimes it feels like a workplace comedy and sometimes it feels like a thriller,\u201d Loktev explains. \u201cI edit it in the way that I would a fiction [project] \u2014 in scenes\u2026 Literally, the film is one scene followed by another scene, followed by another scene. It\u2019s scenes with characters doing stuff which we\u2019re used to in fiction but strangely has become fairly rare in documentary.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tArchive is used sparingly, to illustrate the work of the journalists.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Vladimir<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tRussian President Vladimir Putin<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tContributor\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou see why perhaps Putin was not fond of them \u2014 you need to see that,\u201d the director says. \u201cThe archival footage we use, it\u2019s like if I was doing a film about a painter, you\u2019d want to see their paintings or a basketball player, you\u2019d want to see them playing basketball.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPutin\u2019s attempt to redraw the map of Europe recalls a previous leader of Soviet times \u2013 a man responsible for tens of millions of deaths of his own people, as well as the establishment of the Gulag to incarcerate perceived dissidents \u2013 the \u201cundesirables\u201d of an earlier era.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cObviously there is again a glorification of Stalin, a glorification of the past that is happening\u2026 But it is also how authoritarians work. It\u2019s how you tell your history, how you tell your present,\u201d Loktev observes. \u201cI think we see that now in the States too. One of the things that happens in the course of the film is that Russia shuts down the oldest human rights organization, which was dedicated to preserving the memory of victims of political repression and investigating this. And they shut this down saying, \u2018Why should we have to be ashamed of our history? We won World War II. Can\u2019t we talk about pleasant things instead of unpleasant things like this?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat attitude rhymes with Trump administration, which has intervened to dictate what the Smithsonian Institution, for instance, can and cannot say<\/a> about uncomfortable realities of U.S. history. \u201c\u2019Why must we talk about unpleasant things like slavery?\u2019\u201d says Loktev says, paraphrasing Trump administration talking points. \u201c\u2019Can\u2019t we just talk about the nice things in our history and tell it in a glorified way?\u2019 [That\u2019s] very much part of how these things work. It is part of how authoritarians work. You tell your past so that you can enact your present.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Director<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tDirector Julia Loktev<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDia Dipasupil\/Getty Images for FLC<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Loktev\u2019s documentary unfolds, her protagonists become branded in effect as enemies of the state, with dramatic consequences.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSome of them have been declared terrorists and extremists in Russia,\u201d Loktev says. \u201cSome have been convicted in absentia and none of them can work openly in Russia now because over the course of the film, Russia basically shut down all independent journalists and all my characters had to flee the country with a suitcase, like a carry-on suitcase, within a few hours.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThere is precedent for a lengthy documentary earning Oscar recognition. Ezra Edelman\u2019s 2016 film O.J.: Made in America \u2013 run time 7 hours, 47 minutes \u2013 won the Oscar. But after that, the Academy changed its rules to eliminate from competition any documentary perceived as being more in the realm of episodic rather than a single, unified film.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe had to get the executive committee of the doc branch to rule on it,\u201d Loktev shares. \u201cThere\u2019s a simple rule that says [to qualify] a film has to play in a theater for one week, three times a day. And you can\u2019t show five-and-a-half-hour film three times a day in a normal movie theater unless you\u2019re playing it at really weird times that nobody wants to go to the movie theater\u2026 They had to look at it and say, \u2018Yes, we consider it [eligible].\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"'My<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tArgot Pictures<\/p>\n

\n\tGiven that the film\u2019s subtitle says it\u2019s \u201cPart I,\u201d does that mean there will be a Part II of My Undesirable Friends? Absolutely. Loktev is currently work on it.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere\u2019s a Part 2 that follows all the characters in exile,\u201d she tells Deadline. \u201cPart 1 starts from when people had no idea that a full-scale war would start and we lived through these months with them and then through the first week as they flee the country. And then Part 2 begins a few days later when they\u2019re just in the first stages of having left with a carry-on [suitcase], their media has been shut down, they have no idea where they\u2019re going, and then they have to get back up on their feet as journalists. It takes place in some 13 countries because people keep moving. We get to follow this process of exile\u2026 as it happens through these young journalists.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tLoktev adds, \u201cI\u2019m endlessly surprised by how people keep working, how people even now in exile, all of them work as independent journalists. How they find the strength to keep going, how you keep fighting when the fight seems lost.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Julia Loktev\u2019s documentary My Undesirable Friends: Part I \u2013 Last Air in Moscow enters Oscar shortlist voting with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":338698,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[147664,115082,88,166078,206,170440],"class_list":{"0":"post-338697","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-argot-pictures","9":"tag-awardsdoc","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-julia-loktev","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-my-undesirable-friends-part-1-the-last-air-in-moscow"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/338698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}