My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow

What begins as a portrait of Russian independent journalists under persecution becomes a record of exile after the country launches its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Filming in Moscow during the first week of war, the filmmaker captures a community resisting propaganda as outlets shut down.

Julia Loktev: 'This is a film that could not be made today: the world it depicts — a vibrant community of journalists and activists fiercely and vocally opposed to Putin's regime — no longer exists in Moscow. I started out making a feature film about journalists being named "foreign agents". Then history took over, and it became a multi-chapter documentary epic shot on an extremely intimate scale.

I arrived on 8 October 2021. That first night, Anya was having friends over for dinner, and I had lined up a well-known documentary cinematographer to come film it. But then Anya said, "You're our friend, and we'd feel more comfortable with just you around." I grabbed my old iPhone X, borrowed a mic from Anya's husband, a top podcast producer, and started shooting. Everything in the film happened organically like that. I worked on instinct. What I thought was a week-long research trip turned into Chapter One of the film.

Shooting alone on my phone created an incredible intimacy and immediacy that I would never have achieved with a larger camera or even one other crew member present. Shooting this way both forced me to be physically very close to the characters and allowed me to disappear. After making fiction films where each shot was precisely composed, this felt like a cleansing of everything I thought was important in making a film, and I loved it.’