Optimistic Channel: Julia Loktev on My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow

Julia Loktev wasn't exactly sure what type of film she would be making when she arrived in Moscow from New York in October 2021. Vladimir Putin had begun targeting Russian journalists with new fervor that summer, and the Soviet-born American filmmaker—who had friends in investigative and activist circles—knew that she wanted to document the realities of working under his oppressive regime. She had expected to make a 90-minute feature. But nearly five years on from that moment, she has filmed and edited more than that, because, to put it simply, history happened. Russia’s shock invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 presented Loktev with an extraordinary story that extends beyond state censorship of its fourth estate; what started as a chronicle of resistance and ambient paranoia became, suddenly, an invaluable time capsule of the outbreak of the most aggressive war in Europe since World War II. No longer containable in Loktev’s originally intended form, escalating events insisted on an epic canvas, and, come that point of crushing crescendo, the unique perspective established by the director allows us to see history play out in rare, rivetingly intimate detail.

My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow (2024) is the first installment in what will be a two-part film (the second installment, subtitled Exile, is scheduled to premiere in 2026). Across the five chapters of part one, Loktev introduces a group of leftist journalists who have been named “foreign agents” and “undesirables” by the Russian government. That new appellation dictates that any information they disseminate, down to the most innocuous content on social media, be affixed with a disclaimer that makes clear their “undesirable” status. Whether posting pastel images of sunset skies and flowers to personal accounts, or publishing excoriating criticism of Russian tyranny in newspapers, these individuals are effectively labeled: not to be trusted. While the spiel reluctantly appended becomes something of a joke, inconveniencing but not thwarting them, “foreign agent” designation hints at being not just censored but also surveilled; non-compliance also risks punitive fines. That the opposition leader Alexei Navalny was recently poisoned is surely not far, either, from these Muscovite dissidents’ minds. 

Uncertainty adds an extra shiver to Moscow’s winter air as Loktev is introduced via her friend, Anna Nemzer, to Anna’s comrades, most of whom work with her at an independent news channel. Natalya Sindeyeva, its founder, established TV Rain as a culture and lifestyle station in 2010. Appealing to young, fashionable audiences, she named it after her love of dancing in the rain, accessorized it with the additional moniker “Optimistic Channel,” and decorated its logo and graphics in her favorite color: bright pink. Yet the pull of the party gave way to other calls, as the Russian public, and its youth especially, became increasingly politicized with the anti-corruption protest movement of 2011–13. It was then that TV Rain evolved into an outlet for more serious reportage—although the pink persisted, along with optimism enough to pop champagne in the studio semi-frequently, while punk and metal musicians gave cathartic, raucous sound to discontent.

Loktev’s camera—an iPhone, which she alone operates for hours upon hours with seemingly easy dexterity—is enamored with the journalists she encounters: primarily young women who came of age in the 2010s. Of course, Loktev tells me on our call, there were men in the TV Rain offices, but they were “not as interesting.” Warm, strikingly clever, and armed with specifically Soviet humor (darkly sarcastic), the women we come to know in the film—Alesya, Irina, Ksenia, Lena, Olga, Sonya—face absurdity and fear with impressive tenacity. And Loktev, charming and talented in her own way, soon bonds with them, spending as much time in their homes as in their places of work. She is teased with affection for underdressing—again!—in the freezing cold; greeted with just-out-the-shower embraces, homemade cake and clementines. She has conversations with them that are close enough to be, aptly for these “agents,” conspiratorial in tone. Hide hard drives in vibrators, goes one top tip shared between girls, and then state officials will never find them, never even dare look. 

We know how this will end. Loktev doesn’t shy away from it, signaling right at the start of the film that these women will leave Russia when the full-scale war eventually erupts. Where TV Rain’s abiding, rose-tinted optimism might come in that inevitable descent is up for discussion all through the film. Anna surmises very early on that “you really have to search for optimism” these days, and come New Year’s Eve, another reporter confesses she is struggling to find it. She can only be positive for about 40 seconds. She doesn’t think next year will be any better. While the “last air” of the title refers to TV Rain’s broadcasting, there is an omnipresent threat across chapters that optimism itself will soon be taken off air—asphyxiated, shut down. 

My Undesirable Friends, so far at least, moves through contradiction. (As for the speed of that movement, Loktev is absolutely right when she says to me, excitedly, “It is five-and-a-half hours, yet sure isn’t slow!”) Anna, for her part, says that life is “great and awful,” that she fluctuates between near-hysteria and complacency. One political podcaster in her mid-twenties is depicted wearing a bracelet on which tiny beads spell out “baby,” but is much more adult than some men more than twice her age. And while these millennial women often narrate events by referring to popular fantasy novels—the Kremlin is “Mordor,” and the fight against Putin is compared with the fight against Voldemort—each of them is firmly grounded in the real world too. Against the strange-making, malignant obfuscations of state propaganda, it is, they say, imperative that they “create a record.”

In collaborating with them, Loktev has created an indispensable record of her own. While unfinished as yet, this long-form documentary already has widespread critical acclaim—and some famous fans. In an interview shortly before his death, Frederick Wiseman commended the film’s editing, and Meryl Streep asked what she could do for the film after watching it, going on to introduce an in-person screening. Calling from London (where Britons’ right to protest is also under attack), I spoke with Loktev about what was happening before she travelled to Moscow in 2021, the traces of different film genres that surface across her documentary, and the tragedy of its increasing relevance today.

MUBI: Can we talk firstly about your relationship to Russia?

JULIA LOKTEV: I was born in Russia, but I was a child when I left the Soviet Union. I haven’t lived in Putin’s Russia. But I was connected because I visited it, and I knew activists and journalists there, like Anya. I speak with my mom in Russian, too. So I have an insider-outsider perspective as an American. I was also immersed in the Russian context before filming this, because I was working on a film that was a love story, a fiction film that started, in fact, during the 2011–13 protest movement in Russia.

MUBI: I read that that project would have been set across three different countries, and then of course COVID-19 made it impossible to shoot internationally. Why pivot back to documentary at this point, after almost twenty years away from it?

LOKTEV: Late in the summer of 2021, just as Putin’s Russia started naming journalists “foreign agents,” I read a New York Times headline: “Russian Journalists Face Crackdown with Humor, and Subscribers.” That humor drew me to the story, as did one photo beneath the headline, of two women who became two of my main protagonists, Sonya and Olga. They looked cool! Silver jewelry, black t-shirts, blue jeans, standing against a distressed wall… They looked like they could have been here in Bushwick. And they had been named “foreign agents.” I spoke to Anya, and I said, “Something is happening.” 

MUBI: Sonya looks back at that 2011–13 moment, a flashpoint for her politicization and for many others, at one point in the film.

LOKTEV: Yeah, some characters attended or graduated college during those protests. Other characters were school-age. Certainly, many were young; they talk, for example, about how they were in first grade when Putin came to power, and about how they were marked by that protest movement and its failures. Even if it seemed pretty clear Putin wouldn’t be overthrown, they had an idea of wanting to make a difference. 

MUBI: Anna Nemzer is credited as codirector on part one. I’m curious: What sort of documentary did you two have in mind when you were still in New York, between reading that article and flying to Moscow? 

LOKTEV: Russia had just started giving out visas again after COVID. It took a while to get my tourist visa, like a couple of weeks. While we waited, Anya and I went through the list of foreign agents. There were 25 back then. There are hundreds now. We wanted to film journalists, which left half a dozen from that list, mostly young women. That was our casting. 

We gathered all these women on a video call, and I said to them that I didn’t have any idea what this film would look like; I wouldn’t have any desire to make it if I did. They were getting a lot of press requests around that time, these foreign agents. So they thought that I would just be someone else who wanted to film them for a bit—five minutes and I would disappear. Who knew I would spend four years with them! That’s a joke we share now… Because we really did all become friends. It’s a community. 

MUBI: What happened once you were finally in Moscow after those two weeks?

LOKTEV: It all happened in this organic, instinctive way. When Anya invited me to join her and her friends for dinner on the first night, she said not to bring my cinematographer: “We don’t really know him. Can you maybe film instead?” So I borrowed a camera from this cinematographer I was going to use, but I wasn’t able to work that camera out. Things were happening! Everyone was talking about interesting stuff. So I just picked up a microphone that belonged to Anya’s husband, and my phone, and started shooting. 

I knew within five minutes that that was right. I never thought about getting someone else to shoot after, never thought about another, larger camera—although I did get the newer iPhone when I filmed the second chapter, because I was using such an old model first. As we’re all so used to being around phones, I could be with these journalists in an intimate way, while positioning the viewer there too. You come and visit, I introduce you to some friends, and then you hang out with us too. 

MUBI: That intimacy affords you incredible access to what is going on behind the scenes at TV Rain, and we soon see that it’s a unique sort of news channel. 

LOKTEV: It was this kind of oppositional public square. It looked nothing like a news channel, but more like it was MTV from back in the day. There were cool people working there, surrounded by pink neon and bands sometimes playing. And their main focus was reporting, while working out in the open as the opposition. It’s now utterly unimaginable, isn’t it? But no one had any idea that there was going to be a full-scale war in Ukraine, with Russia bombing Kyiv… the kind of war we’ve been witnessing now for more than four years. 

MUBI: One thing I find unique to these leftist journalists when I compare them with leftist individuals in other places, where there may be an allergy to patriotism, is how strongly they feel about Russia: protectively, if not positively. They are affronted by what Putin has done to their country, but they’re not ready to turn their backs on the country itself. 

LOKTEV: While they’re ashamed of Russia, for many of them, Russia is a place that they deeply love. That connection to your country goes two ways. These are people who want Russia to be a better place… Yet they are all now in exile and may not return for decades. Isn’t that amazing? Other people would just say, “Screw it. I don’t want anything to do with this.” They would say, “Not my president. I didn’t choose this war.” They would dissociate. But these people don’t. There is a sense of accountability that really interests me. None of them feel like they are able to wash their hands of the war.

MUBI: You refer in other interviews to the journalists we see most frequently in the film as “characters.” Would you be able to talk more about how fiction influenced the way you thought of storytelling with this film? 

LOKTEV: I capture awful moments, so it feels awful to say, but I was lucky as a filmmaker. I captured history through these people. And because I started to film four months before the invasion, because of the incredible hospitality and generosity of these characters, by the time war has started, you live history with the people who have already opened up to you.

One of my favorite things people often say is that this film is a love story. I do think there is a lot of love in this film, and it is more than romantic love; it is love for work, friends, and community. I have also seen it described as a hangout film—a hangout film for the time of authoritarianism—and other people say it plays like a horror, or a thriller, which is funny, because we all know what happens. I tell you how it will end at the beginning: All of the characters leave Russia. It isn’t what happens, however, but how it happens.

MUBI: I know you’ve cited Frederick Wiseman as an influence, which might be interesting in this regard. He spoke frequently about the novel as an important reference for how he approached and edited his work, which was so often, like My Undesirable Friends, long-form. 

LOKTEV: I love editing. I love learning from the material, and respecting the rhythm of it. In the moment of shooting, there was so much happening. I was laser-focused, but racing to keep up with it all. Then, stepping away, I had space to realize exactly what you say: It is similar to an epic novel. It has two volumes! I have heard it described as a Russian novel, but I have also heard it being compared to reality television: one of those shows in which young people are finding themselves. I don’t mind; it has elements of that too. 

But any novelistic quality really comes into play in the editing room. There, you structure and shape. This is where Wiseman is influential for me. He edited by working through every scene on its own terms, studying it and—rather than imposing his vision on it—looking closely at what it might be telling him. I spend months doing just this, seeing what might emerge from the footage. 

There is archival material put in, but that is all the work of TV Rain journalists. I thought that if I were making a film about a painter, then I would want to see her paintings. So here, I wanted us to see the work that is so unsettling for the Russian government. 

MUBI: What did emerge from the footage in the editing room? 

LOKTEV: I suppose there are all the things working in contradiction to the disaster. Where I get interested is faces, emotions, and details: the texture of life. All of this is catnip to me—like Anya’s daughter doing those vocalization or breathing exercises with a cork while Anya is talking to me in her car. I don’t think I’ve ever made something like this, with people often alighting on little details no one else has mentioned yet. Someone commented, for instance, on when we see Alesya wear that girly dress for New Year’s—it’s unexpected!

Now that I’m nearing the end of part two, I’m editing it thinking, “What will I do when I’m no longer hanging out with these characters by watching them every day?” It’ll be lonely! It’s a pleasure to edit for the time being, hearing their jokes, feeling their feelings. 

MUBI: You do become so immersed in their lives, and so much here has universal resonance—a lot of it comforting, but a lot of it unnerving. All the same, I wonder whether there have been differences in the ways that, say, Russian, European, and American audiences have reacted to the film? 

LOKTEV: My goal was to tell this story in a way that communicated it to someone who knows almost nothing about Russia. They can name maybe Putin, maybe Navalny. They probably can’t name a Russian woman. 

I have a screening club at home: When I edited a chapter, I showed it at this film club, which had all kinds of people watching; because it’s cosmopolitan New York, these people were from different places. I have a roommate from Iran. Some friends grew up in Argentina under the dictatorship. They kept saying they had never seen anything that captures what it feels like to live in an authoritarian country like this.

Then of course last year Americans started saying, “It’s all about us!” I did not want to make something so relevant… As a citizen and a person, I’m horrified that it is. But it is, and that shifts every day now. Until last week, I had thought that only chapters one through three might be relevant. Then America started—what is it now?—this “Special Combat Operation.” Oh no, that was it: Just last week, a New Yorker cartoon was satirizing it with a book cover that read “Limited Combat Operation and Peace,” playing on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. So the world keeps catching up, unfortunately, to this film.

Back in Russia, a huge part of society has left: many of the young people, many of those who were hoping to make a better country. Ultimately, this is their story.