The Luxury of Meaning: Julia Loktev on ‘My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile’

Julia Loktev’s NYFF and Venice-premiering My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile is, like last year’s NYFF-premiering My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, a brutally riveting five-chapter epic that follows a group of Russian independent journalists branded traitors and terrorists in the eyes of the Kremlin. Primarily female, they risk everything to report on Putin’s corrupt regime and his senseless war in an effort to simultaneously save Ukrainian lives and free their own propaganda-run homeland. As we learn from the opening text onscreen, this latest installment begins just two days after Last Air in Moscow ended, and also that a week before it was still possible to live in Russia and tell the truth, but now it seems “unimaginable this world ever existed.” Thus, Loktev decides to follow her “undesirable friends” as they dash to the airport, often on an hour’s notice, and into the great unknown of forced exile. In the process, she’s able to intimately document the new surrealities of daily life, like trying to stay under the radar of Kremlin assassins while finding a partner on Tinder. Just prior to the NYFF debut of My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile, Documentary caught up with the acclaimed narrative and nonfiction filmmaker, who spoke about everything from shooting (in Prague, Tbilisi, Amsterdam, Riga, Kyiv and NYC) her abruptly rootless, peripatetic protagonists on an iPhone, to how Frederick Wiseman transformed her editing process, to thinking of meaning as a “luxury” in today’s chaotic times.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.