“When will these dark times pass? How much longer do we have to endure this?”
These anguished questions, asked by one of the journalists featured in Julia Loktev’s five-and-a-half-hour My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow, have yet to be answered. Loktev shot the film using her phone, and no crew, during the last months of 2021 into early 2022, leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The final date of footage is March 2, 2022, when the people we’ve met in the film flee the country.
The subjects in My Undesirable Friends are journalists in a perilous position. An independent press, free from state-mandated propaganda, had almost ceased to exist under Putin; and the situation worsened in early 2021, when the late Alexei Navalny, a powerful opposition leader, was arrested and imprisoned. The press was hounded, attacked, and labeled “foreign agents.”
Loktev, born in St. Petersburg, and raised in the United States, embeds herself with a friend group in Moscow who work at TV Rain, the last independent Russian-language television channel at the time of filming. My Undesirable Friends is often quite lively, and the people we meet have vivid personalities. The overwhelming feeling, though, is one of dread. The journalists know they have a target on their backs. One woman’s fiancé was imprisoned and she’s not allowed to talk to him. Those who haven’t left Russia wait and worry. Fear is the oxygen they breathe.
Tyrants know what they’re doing when they suppress freedom of speech. It’s usually their first target. In 1722, a teenage Benjamin Franklin wrote: “Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech.” In My Undesirable Friends we watch that happen.
What Loktev captures most of all is the tenacity and grit of her colleagues, and their willingness to put themselves in grave danger so they can speak the truth. Now more than ever, we can find courage in their example.