NYFF 64: "My Undesirable Friends: Part II - Exile" is as vivid as its predecessor

by Joanna Sodeman-Taylor

Forget spectacle, forget box office, forget IP and star power. Digger? I hardly know her! The biggest, most epic movie of the year is Julia Loktev’s six-hour documentary My Undesirable Friends: Part II - Exile, a continuation of last year’s Part I, subtitled Last Air in Moscow. That film followed roughly a dozen journalists, most of them women, at the independent reporting outfit known as TV Rain. These folks had already spent years operating as “undesirables” or “foreign agents” (ie, folks not mindlessly repeating government propaganda), and worked to undermine the dictums coming from the Kremlin despite constant surveillance and the imprisonment of several colleagues. Last Air in Moscow concluded with a huge chunk of TV Rain’s reporters fleeing Russia following the start of their invasion into Ukraine in February 2022.

The military operation led Putin’s government to immediately crack down on independent media, meaning these journalists had to get the fuck out of dodge or risk being jailed. Last Air in Moscow filmed across a span of several months in 2021-2022, and Exile takes up right where that film left off, seeing those same faces (and a few new ones) all the way to March 2026...

Exile begins as the TV Rain journalists who fled to Latvia are welcomed by their colleague, Anna Nemzer, the editor-in-chief who got the hell out of Russia right before the war started and has continued reporting on state affairs from afar. Their attempts to reconcile these new lives are clarified a bit when their cab driver start claiming they require a higher fare than was originally promised. Ditto a hostel owner claiming that he’s not able to track down their reservations. It’s impossible, maybe even pointless, to gauge if these are honest miscommunications from well-meaning service workers or sleazy attempts to secure more money from visibly panicking expatriates. The loss of their home country is profound, and this massive shift in living situation will undoubtedly exacerbate ongoing tensions around personal finances, family, housing security, and national safety.

Yet, the fundamental struggle between activist journalism and existing in the world as human beings remains their ultimate challenge and the film's focus. Speaking of, boy do these folks face a lot of challenges. Conducting independent journalism from outside of Russia presents its own difficulties, though the war inspires soldiers to anonymously share their experiences at the front line and the failures of the military brass. TV Rain’s language and their assumption of a Russian audience come in conflict with the desires and expectations of their new host country. Some of the discourses that impact their day-to-day flow are reminiscent of leftist infighting, as the journalist’s feelings of guilt and culpability around their motherland’s crimes lead to conflicts that seem utterly disproportionate to the inciting issue.

Then again, when you and your team and your loved ones are still being spied on by Putin’s thugs, when your dad is dying in a Russian hospital and you have no way to see him, when so much is hopelessly out of your control, what else is there to do except fight to make sure the news organization you gave up everything for is doing the very best job it can? TV Rain will move stations more than once across the film's extensive runtime, and several staff will depart for new horizons before the end credits roll. One of the journalists didn’t even bother to leave with everyone else - Russia was already a dangerous place, so what’s actually changed about his station or his mission? Some go to Ukraine for reporting, others to join the army. A small handful go to the US, and are harrowed to see how Trump has inspired the same bigoted, totalitarian fervor that Putin instilled at home.

If you were one of those viewers who felt Last Air in Moscow didn’t sufficiently cover these characters checking their privilege as Russians, or as enemies of the state who are still able to escape imprisonment, then get ready for a good bit of reflection on those topics. The background of Navalny’s poisoning and increased violence against enemies of the state informs their vigilance, exhaustion, and gallows humor a great deal. To paraphrase a journalist joking about receiving warnings from multiple sources that she will be arrested if she returns to Russia, “Thank God all three of them told me, if it was just one I wouldn’t have believed it.” In interviews, Loktev has talked about flying across multiple countries to check in on her colleagues at the drop of a hat. Every time a new development happened at the newly restored TV Rain, now operating with the funding and permission of the Latvian government, or a political tremor destabilized someone’s housing, she was on her way to film it.

As a documentarian but also a friend, the director shows a remarkable skill for giving her subjects the space to bare their souls without coming across as a manipulative presence, mediating reality for her audience's lurid pleasure. Her camera is often too close to her subject’s faces, which happens when you can only find privacy in cramped taxicabs or small apartments, to ever be mistaken as fly-on-the-wall, Wiseman-y cinema. Nevertheless, what she achieves is just as astonishing in its authentic intimacy and moment-to-moment sharpness. Her unflinching presence makes Loktev an ideal companion to journalists reckoning with their own safety and impact. Maintaining her audiovisual strategies from Last Air in Moscow, the filmmaker's editing patterns are tightly bound to dialogue and conversation, cutting the actual passage of weeks, months, years, into smithereens.

Still, we also get a little more time to sit in these character’s emotions, letting their silences define the tone of a scene as much as their conversations, their reporting. And if I am overly broad in my description of what Exile is doing, then so be it. As much as My Undesirable Friends goes for pointillist portraiture, zeroing in on just one incident or one character feels like an easy path to just talking about every single thing that happens. I will at least single out how lovely it was to be in these folks’ domestic spaces. The lesbians are delightful, as well as Anna’s interactions with her early-teen daughter. Among the craziest things to happen in any film this year, nothing can prepare us for the insane title card that follows a walk-on appearance from one of the journalist’s roommates.

Back to the broad topics, Exile offers many fabulously-etched meditations about how political activists reconcile the active threats against their lives with the privilege of being able to fight without actively fearing for their lives like soldiers on the battlefield or civilians under threat of foreign missiles. The occasional interruptions from trials conducted against the journalists in absentia put this into a clear relief, as the laugh-out-loud ridiculousness of being told to serve the next two years in jail reveals how badly these people want to return as free citizens in a free country, to make things better however they can. Loktev has made this goal poignant and palpable across her gigantic canvas, and I hope more people see it as the year goes on and this essential non-fiction epic becomes more available.

After its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, My Undesirable Friends: Part II - Exile screened as part of the 64th NYFF's Main Slate. If you're in New York, the film will start screening at Film Forum this Friday, October 9, bolstered by executive producer credits bearing such big names as Meryl Streep and Laura Poitras, and support from the from the Ashes and Diamonds Fund for Eastern European Film and The Endowed Fund for Emerging Filmmakers. Hopefully, it'll receive a wider release later on. Don't miss it!

Comments

[Cláudio Alves]

Like last year, thank you for pushing me to watch Loktev's latest gargantuan documentary. I might prefer Part I when all is said and done, but EXILE is still an achievement of such magnitude that it's hard to put into words. You did a great job at articulating why it works, finding a succinctness I simply would have failed to achieve, no matter how hard I tried. I can imagine the myriad little moments I'd want to describe and unspool, including so many observations about how Loktev lets us feel the passage of time, or how often she obscures it. Not to the extent of LAST AIR IN MOSCOW, but fascinatingly done nonetheless. I know nobody wants to give editing awards to six-hour movies, yet the micro gestures within the humongous macro structure are endlessly fascinating.