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Great documentaries never turn out exactly how you plan them. You may begin to think you are making a single film, but a reporter must be willing to accept when the lives of their subjects change the nature of their project.
Julia Loktev’s two-part documentary “My Undesirable Friends” is a good example of this. The films, which follow journalists at TV Rain, which was the last independent news channel in Russia before it was shut down over its coverage of the war in Ukraine, began as a story about journalists working in a hostile climate. But when her subjects were forced to flee the country and disperse throughout Europe, “My Unwanted Friends” had to expand its scale.
In a conversation with IndieWire’s Chris O’Falt at our Art of the Doc event, Loktev opened up about the origins of the project. While she had already been shooting portraits of her subjects, the films really took shape the week Russia invaded Ukraine.
“Neither of these two films was supposed to happen,” Loktev said. “I just started making a film that I thought was going to be called ‘The Lives of Foreign Agents’ about these young journalists who are called foreign agents. And the media were labeled as undesirable entities. Of course, what we didn’t know was that four and a half months later, Russia would start a full-scale war with Ukraine and shut down all the independent media within that first week.
“‘Part II’ begins immediately after all these journalists have left the country,” she continued. “Putin calls them the flies that Russia spits out of its mouth. But that first week was scary. No one could think of invading Ukraine. The war had been going on for eight years, but this was the kind of year in which the world allowed Russia to hold the world cup… It could still work in Russia and then it stopped.”
Watch the full conversation with Loktev in the video above.
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