NYFF 64: "My Undesirable Friends: Part II - Exile" is as vivid as its predecessor
Tuesday, October 6, 2026 at 10:00AM 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...