{"id":378460,"date":"2025-12-30T20:02:11","date_gmt":"2025-12-30T20:02:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/378460\/"},"modified":"2025-12-30T20:02:11","modified_gmt":"2025-12-30T20:02:11","slug":"my-undesirable-friends-part-i-last-air-in-moscow-makes-oscar-shortlist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/378460\/","title":{"rendered":"My Undesirable Friends Part I Last Air in Moscow Makes Oscar Shortlist"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn an unusually competitive documentary<\/a> landscape this awards<\/a> season \u2014 featuring the return of an Oscar-winning Ukrainian filmmaker from a warzone, a critical and audience phenomenon that reached millions via Netflix \u2014 one especially unlikely contender has still managed to stand out. With her first documentary feature in nearly 30 years, Julia Loktev (The Loneliest Planet) is striking a chord with My Undesirable Friends: Part I \u2014 Last Air in Moscow, a v\u00e9rit\u00e9 portrait of journalists in Russia as their country launches a war with Ukraine. In just under five and a half hours of runtime, these subjects feel the tightening, irreversible grip of authoritarianism forcing them out of their home \u2014 but they still live life, sharing meals and making jokes, and taking things day by day. Taken together, My Undesirable Friends weaves an epic tapestry of humanity.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film premiered to strong reviews at the 2024 New York Film Festival, but in the year-plus since, has been unable to find a distributor. (It was self-distributed to qualify for Oscars<\/a> consideration this cycle.) In the time since, My Undesirable Friends has won top documentary prizes from the New York Film Critics\u2019 Circle and other regional groups, been shortlisted for the best doc Oscar, and dominated publications\u2019 year-end best-of lists among nonfiction movies. Accordingly, just as Loktev finishes work on her second, equally lengthy installment, the film\u2019s fortunes may soon change. \u201cWe should hopefully have news soon,\u201d Loktev tells The Hollywood Reporter.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the road has not been easy \u2014 Loktev has had miniscule funds to work with, compared with her competitors, and knows the challenge of getting voters to see the longest film in the running. \u201cWhen you see on paper, \u2018Oh, it\u2019s a five and a half hour film about Russian journalists,\u2019 you go, \u2018Scary, I\u2019m not sure about that,\u2019\u201d she says. \u201cBut then more people watch it, and the more people actually talk about what the experience of it is, the word starts spreading.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSee below for THR\u2019s Q&A with Loktev.<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019m curious how you thought about the way this would be released, given the length. Did an episodic format ever come up, especially with the existing chapter structure? What was it like planning to get it out into the world?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe whole making of the film has been this crazy endeavor. I shot it alone with an iPhone, no crew, and basically have been the director, producer, cinematographer \u2014 and I had a co-editor and an assistant editor, so literally most of the film has been three people. That\u2019s it. I started filming a film in Russia four months before the full scale war, when nobody knew that Russia would start this horrific war in Ukraine, and then history just started unrolling super fast, and I was there and filming it all. There was no time to think; I just had to keep filming. I was there during this historic event and I had a tiny seed development grant. There was no planning.<\/p>\n

\n\tI continued to film all the characters in exile and then I just thought, I have this incredible historic footage, captured through people you get to know as characters the way you would in a fiction film. I let the film become what it needs to be rather than have somebody tell me what it should be. There was a point very early in the editing process that I walked away from equity that would\u2019ve funded the whole film.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tReally? Wow.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt would\u2019ve imposed a format on it. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be a feature-length film.\u201d I said, \u201cI need to see how to shape this. I have this incredible footage and I want it to tell me what the film should be and I want to be true to the actual material and true to the events.\u201d So I got some grants and just kept editing to make it what it needs to be. It was obvious it would\u2019ve been an easier path to go and find a place and have somebody telling me exactly what to make it into, but I owed it to the story to let it be what it needed to become.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs you were starting to put this together, what told you that this was the final format, a five-plus-hour film? It\u2019s not typical, obviously, even if you had so much footage to work with.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd it\u2019s an enormous amount of story \u2014 it\u2019s not just footage. I mean you can condense all the footage you want to. I was basically there to capture this historic exodus from this moment, from when it\u2019s still possible to work as the opposition in Russia and be an independent journalist in this authoritarian society and fight back, to when everybody realizes that to continue to do this work, we have to flee this country. A million people left. What the film does, I think, is it lets you live through it with people. I come from fiction \u2014 I filmed them like they were characters in a fiction film that you live through it with them, feel through it with them. It\u2019s not experts explaining things. It\u2019s just really being in the moment.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf you make it into an hour and a half film or a two hour film, yes, you could do it and it would be this condensed version where you get the information \u2014 and you can get the information in a New York Times article, you can find the information elsewhere. But to feel what it feels like to live through it with characters that you could hopefully fall in love with, you needed to have time to understand that. It\u2019s a very long film, but a super fast-cut film \u2014 it\u2019s not a meditative film at all. You\u2019re having trouble sometimes keeping up reading the subtitles so fast, but it\u2019s dense.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd I mean, it\u2019s not a series because no streamer wanted it. (Laughs) I would\u2019ve had a lot more money to make it if they did \u2014 and a lot more money now for an awards campaign, God knows. But at the same time, I question these distinctions because if you think about it, like all the great Russian novels, Crime and Punishment and War and Peace, not to mention the Charles Dickens novels or Ulysses, were all released in serialized forms and magazines first and then became novels. We don\u2019t question, now, is War and Peace a novel?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe beauty of the film is that this feeling of real life happening, but you are still a filmmaker and there is a certain rigor to your approach. Did the project formally evolve at all, the deeper you got into it?<\/p>\n

\n\tI just tried to work really organically, even in the shooting: Something is happening in front of you and you\u2019re just trying to keep up and frame the shot. Because I do come from fiction, I don\u2019t know if I filmed them any differently than I would an actor giving a great performance, except it happens to be true in their real life and all the more tragic for that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the things that I learned so much from this as a filmmaker is that people are so much more complicated and so much more contradictory and interesting than I could ever write them, to be honest. When we write fiction, so often people go a little bit more on the nose \u2014 if people are going through a tragic moment, they stay in that tragic moment. What I constantly observed with people here is this shift from the most terrible horrible things, to sudden humor, back to the terrible horrible things \u2014 very inappropriately and wonderfully and in a way that I\u2019d think, \u201cWow, I wish I could write like this.\u201d This taught me so much in having to observe in a very focused way as you\u2019re filming, and seeing people joke in the middle of their lives falling apart.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat was your relationship to the subjects like? You\u2019re very present in the movie as the one with the camera, and as you mentioned, they trusted you implicitly to do this.<\/p>\n

\n\tI knew Anna Nemzer, who leads us into this world. She knew all the other characters in some way professionally or as peripheral acquaintances, friends to different degrees. She brought me into this world as a trusted person. I was born in Russia, and so Russian is the language I speak to my mom, even though I grew up in the States. It would be a completely different relationship if I was coming in without that. But people opened up to me very quickly, very instantly. We had a rapport, and then over the course of filming we became friends. That\u2019s a huge part of the film because you experience it with me \u2014 you literally meet a lot of these characters as I\u2019m meeting them. You get to know them and hopefully they become your desirable friends as well as mine. They\u2019re \u201cundesirable\u201d only because that\u2019s what the Russian government has marked them as. That\u2019s an actual legal category in Russia where they have marked most journalist organizations and most of civil society as \u201cundesirable organizations.\u201d They\u2019re undesirable to their authoritarian project.<\/p>\n

\n\tHow have you experienced screening the film over the last few months, getting it out there in an awards context?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOh, Jesus, my favorite subject \u2014 the campaign. (Laughs) We\u2019re trying to do our best. When I heard what the streamers<\/a> spend on their films, my jaw dropped. We can only do a tiny fraction of what is supposedly considered necessary to do. We are just doing our best on a micro budget. It\u2019s really, really difficult because you\u2019re sitting there getting bombarded with things from the larger distributors. You\u2019re feeling small and insignificant and feeling FOMO when you have no budget to do anything about it. It\u2019s unfortunate that that\u2019s how things are, but it is how things are and all you can do is your best. We just want the film to reach an audience. That\u2019s what we care about.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt must feel like a nice bit of vindication, then, when you hit the Oscars short list or pick up these critics\u2019 awards. <\/p>\n

\n\tDefinitely. I mean, it\u2019s a tougher road. And $1 or $2 million for a campaign couldn\u2019t hurt.<\/p>\n

\n\tCan I ask what you are working with in terms of money?<\/p>\n

\n\tOh God, it\u2019s a fraction. We\u2019re just trying to extract so little \u2014 like, well, I shouldn\u2019t say that in print. But it\u2019s not like there\u2019s some distributor paying for it. In all honesty, it\u2019s production money that was supposed to eventually pay me, and literally the characters in the film. I didn\u2019t want to do it, to be honest; I was like, \u201cThis seems so crazy to enter into this.\u201d And it was characters from the film who said to me, \u201cListen, try to give the film the best chance possible. Let\u2019s do a little bit of something.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tLaura Poitras<\/a> did an event with us at my house and I went to Tashkent Supermarket, which has all this post-Soviet food in New York. I got a bunch of snacks. I put them on a table. There were no waiters with tiny hors d\u2019oeuvres. That\u2019s what we can do. We\u2019ve had people be very kind. Laura\u2019s been supportive, and I love her film [Cover-Up] as well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film\u2019s portrait of living under creeping authoritarianism has certainly resonated in the U.S., as it\u2019s a relevant topic these days. Have you noticed that?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHow people perceive the film has shifted so much since we opened at the New York Film Festival [in 2024]. It all felt so far away then. It\u2019s just transformed so much. What\u2019s interesting to me is it\u2019s not just about the larger picture, but very specific details in the film that were specific to something happening in Russia that suddenly took on resonance. Somebody has a throwaway joke about when they shut down Russia\u2019s biggest comedy show. It wasn\u2019t planted there. Or when Russia shuts down its oldest human rights organization, which was dedicated to preserving the memory of political repression and addressing political repression in the current times, the judge says, \u201cWhy must we talk about our unpleasant history? We must be proud.\u201d Of course, I\u2019m watching Trump with the Smithsonian now and saying, \u201cWhy must we talk about unpleasant things like slavery?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tLast night I read about the 60 Minutes piece being pulled<\/a>. The crackdown on journalism with Russia, they didn\u2019t go straight for charging journalists with treason and extremism or terrorism. They started with economic pressure, pulling advertisements or threatening to sue journalists for libel \u2014 various kinds of strong-arm techniques that all looked perfectly so-called \u201creasonable.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the nicest things that I\u2019ve heard from people is that it gives them a way of processing the current moment because we\u2019re living through something unprecedented and we don\u2019t know how to deal with it emotionally. There is this cognitive dissonance or horrible things happening in our country. Meanwhile, the fabric of many lives looks completely normal and for the most part undisturbed. If you look around your neighborhood, it looks more or less the same. Life looks nice, and yet what\u2019s actually happening is horrific. That\u2019s really what dystopian societies look like. They don\u2019t look like V for Vendetta. Authoritarianism is really good for some people, and for the rest of us, it is this cognitive dissonance where parts of our lives remain intact and seem very normal, and meanwhile, people are being snatched into unmarked vans by masked men.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhere are you with Part 2?<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019ve edited four out of the five chapters, and so now I have to edit the last one. I\u2019m in the process of doing that now. It\u2019s scary, but I am being given a little bit of hope. I\u2019ve spent four years with these people, and in a way I\u2019m kind of having separation anxiety of what will happen when I finish that. But if the Vladimir Putin<\/a> regime ever falls, we\u2019re going to go back and make a third installment. We may be very, very old by then because it\u2019s not going to go well probably right after.<\/p>\n

\n\tHave you stopped filming? Do you know where this story ends for now, as a film?<\/p>\n

\n\tI haven\u2019t actually stopped filming. I\u2019m not actively filming a lot, but as I\u2019m meditating on the last chapter, I want to end as closely to where we leave off as possible because the story keeps unfolding. I\u2019m pretty sure I know what that last shot will be. Once I get three quarters of the way or 80% of the way with editing this chapter, I want to film that one thing. Probably, that\u2019s when we\u2019ll stop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In an unusually competitive documentary landscape this awards season \u2014 featuring the return of an Oscar-winning Ukrainian filmmaker…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":378461,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[10546,185161,10167,1129,185162,88,66684,206,29506,63794,6508],"class_list":["post-378460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-awards","tag-awards-2026","tag-documentaries","tag-documentary","tag-documentary-spotlight","tag-entertainment","tag-laura-poitras","tag-movies","tag-oscars","tag-streamers","tag-vladimir-putin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378460","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=378460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378460\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}