There’s a phrase that captures a generalized Russian identity and its practically congenital suffering (and consequent gallows humor): “We thought we had hit rock bottom, and then someone knocked from below.” Originating in Soviet-era Poland, that little proverb could serve as a two-act logline for Julia Loktev‘s epic documentary, My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow.
Divided into five chapters, the first three parts of the film spend time with interesting Russian journalists who thought they were approaching rock bottom, while the final two parts let loose the banging echoes from below.
The clear bifurcation in My Undesirable Friends is shaped by the events of 24 February 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine after eight years of a somewhat “warm” war. Months before that devastating decision, Loktev’s interest was piqued by a New York Times story about young independent journalists who were being labeled “foreign agents” by the Russian government.
Loktev (whose last film was 2011’s The Loneliest Planet) was born in St. Petersburg when it was still called Leningrad (before immigrating to the US at the age of nine), and had a journalist friend in Russia named Anna Nemzer. The director followed the universe’s trail of breadcrumbs and on 8 October 2021, one day after acquiring a visa, landed in Moscow.
My Undesirable Friends withholds much of that backstory, instead opening with a very brief bit of foreboding narration, with Loktev somberly stating, “The world you’re about to see no longer exists. None of us knew what was about to happen.”
That’s just about the only narration (or any other traditional documentary cue) you’ll find in the film, with Loktev preferring to drop viewers directly into Russia as if they had just disembarked the plane with the director herself. What she captured over the next several months has resulted in an oddly casual masterpiece of sorts inhabited by people you’ll want to keep spending time with.
Originally intending to work with an expert cinematographer and a nice camera, Loktev ended up filming everything herself, using a slightly outdated iPhone without any crew. As a result, My Undesirable Friends almost feels like extremely lo-fi virtual reality in its unbridled intimacy, with the film’s subjects often speaking directly to us (via Loktev) and in close quarters.
We’re in their passenger seat while they drive, or on the couch next to them while they watch TV, or right behind them as they traverse the office. Beginning with Nemzer, we share the same air as her fellow journalists at TV Rain, which was considered the last remaining independent news channel in Russia at the time.
Most of the film’s subjects are young women journalists who have been labeled “foreign agents”. We meet the funny hosts of the podcast, Hello, You Are a Foreign Agent, Sonya Groysman and Olga Churakova; a pair of investigative reporters, Irina Dolinina and Alesya Marokhovskaya; prominent newscaster Elena Kostyuchenko; and the charismatic Ksenia Mironova, a journalist whose fiancé, Ivan Safronov, is in prison for “treason”.
With My Undesirable Friends being filmed on an iPhone and in such close proximity to their everyday lives, watching the documentary sometimes feels like scrolling through all your friends’ Instagram stories. It’s a pure “hang-out” film, and with its uncompromising length of 324 minutes, it creates surfeit space to organically connect with its subjects.
While we watch these women lament the increasing authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin’s administration and opine about their lives and their work, it’s impossible to forget that opening narration: “None of us knew what was about to happen.” We know what they don’t know, that rock bottom is just another roof to fall through.
“There’s a feeling that, on one hand, we’re all going about our normal lives,” Nemzer says at one point. “We can still go to the movies, enjoy life, do regular stuff, etc. But at the same time, we’re all physically sick from all the news.” Later, a 90-year-old woman puts it more bluntly when she muses, “In Nazi Germany, people also sat and waited and hoped things would be okay.”
My Undesirable Friends is defined by this queasy sense of history being shaped despite our disquietude, of fascism taking form but only being fully noticed when it’s too late. Russia may have been edging closer to totalitarianism in late 2021, but the women in this film were still apprehensive, not wanting to abandon the friends, careers, and lives they had established.
“It’d be one thing if it was my choice, to try living somewhere else, but it’s different if I’m forced to,” Irina Dolinina says. “Because it’s only going to get worse… It’s unlikely we’ll have a choice.” Loktev asks how she will know when to leave and what she is waiting for. “That’s the most terrifying question, because you can miss the right moment, because you think there will be some signal.”
The Russian invasion of Ukraine certainly signaled a change, and the final parts of the film almost operate in the register of a thriller, following the journalists as they attempt to leave the country. Loktev’s film is being released while she is editing My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile, which chronicles the scattered journalists throughout a dozen countries. The film may ultimately answer Irina’s “terrifying question”: whether any of them were too late.
American viewers may ask themselves that very question while watching Part I. When is it too late? When Trump seeks long-term military control of the nation’s capital and other cities? When people are black-bagged off the street by masked, armed men and shipped to countries they’ve never stepped foot in? When war criminals with arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court are invited to Congress and the White House?
Speaking of which, irony of ironies; on the day My Undesirable Friends was released in theaters, 15 August 2025, Vladimir Putin, his plane greeted with a red carpet rollout, shook hands with Donald Trump and his team in Alaska to “discuss” the Russo-Ukrainian War. Talk about undesirable friends.
It brings to mind yet another wise Russian aphorism, this one attributed to the former Prime Minister of Russia, Viktor Chernomyrdin: “This has never happened before, yet here we are again.”