So many different stories went into the creation of the two parts of the sprawling films of the director Julia Loktev “My Undesirable Friends”, which is a total of almost 12 hours, or half a day in the life of a viewer.
For “Part I – Last Air in Moscow” of 2025, the Russian-American filmmaker, based in New York, did not know that when she arrived in Moscow in the fall of 2021, she would take over the only independent news network left in the country, TV Rain, under Vladimir Putin. Nor did she expect that for this year’s sequel “Part II – Exile,” she would then follow the mostly female dissident journalistic group as they scatter across Europe in the wake of Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. No that Meryl Streep would sign on as an executive producer, not to mention watch her film, to help promote the Venice premiere during state awards season.
Often at the Oscar corridor, a celebrity attaches the imprimatur to a documentary or short film that deserves to be told. But what’s a name without real weight behind it?
“It’s kind of a funny story,” Loktev told IndieWire. I have to admit, I don’t hang out with Meryl Streep on a regular basis. But I was working before ‘My Undesirable Friends’ on a fictional film that Colin Firth was going to make, and it fell apart during COVID. [film] began. So I reached out to Colin with ‘My Unpleasant Friends.’ I was like, ‘Can you see it?’ And I was like, ‘Can you think of anybody to present, maybe?'”
Loktev wanted the executive producer “to be a woman because it’s a film about women. And he was like, ‘Well, I could send it to Meryl.’ And I was like, ‘That would be awesome,’ right? The way she told the story when she showed the film is that Colin wrote it and said, ‘You have to see this. It’s necessary,’ which made her roll her eyes.”
You hear “required,” and you’re just like, “No,” as Loktev explained. “She was extremely busy, and apparently, as she told the story, she sat down thinking, out of respect for Colin Firth, ‘I’ll sit down and watch this for 15 minutes’ – and then she got up five and a half hours later. So it’s an amazing story.”
“Part II – Fugitive” also now counts Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras among its executive producers, a natural fit for a director facing a state investigation for her fake photos. Loktev’s status as a Russian-born American has included her in the persecution faced by her documentary subjects, who have been labeled “foreign agents” by the Kremlin for broadcasting news that questioned and criticized the Putin regime.
Among the reporters and journalists that Loktev’s extremely intimate story follows in the sequel: former TV Rain anchor Anna Nemzer, who fled to Georgia and then New York; Elena Kostyuchenko, who may have been a victim of Kremlin poisoning; and TV Rain journalist Peter Ruzavin and Ukrainian reporter Nataliya Gumenyuk, whose relationship unfolds over Zoom calls between Vienna and Ukraine. Journalists Ksenia Mironova and Valeria Ratnikova (TV Rain’s youngest anchor), meanwhile, are now in New York City and attending a Q&A this weekend. After news of the attack, they flee to Istanbul, where “Part II” begins.
Working as a one-woman crew on the film, shooting directly through an iPhone, empowered Loktev as a director. “The fact that I was shooting alone without a crew made the logistics a lot easier,” she said. “You don’t have to get a crew … sometimes I’d wake up in New York, and something would happen in Europe, and I’d have to wake up, go to the airport, and start shooting on the plane. You don’t have to get a crew. I can figure out how to book a ticket and a hotel room for myself. It makes you very portable and flexible to be able to do things when you say I’ll be shooting something, I often knew I would happen alone or often it had to be there.”
At the same time, Loktev doesn’t want audiences to be intimidated by the film’s size and scope. Instead of having a broad knowledge of the current political situation in Russia, “You need empathy and a little bit of curiosity and humor. I always thought it should be a film about Russia for people who don’t really care about Russia or don’t know Russia, or not put it down. hanging out with them. It’s like when you go to visit a friend somewhere in another country.”
As for TV Rain, it runs out of Amsterdam, where “most of the guests are now known as terrorists and terrorists in Russia. Many of them have been arrested in absentia for talking about war crimes. They drive Russian propagandists crazy. They are constantly blocked in Russia because it is the goal of the Russian government to keep people from learning the truth.”
“My Unwanted Friends: Part II – Exile” is now in select theaters from Mubi.