New Screening Added
Here's the scoop: My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow, the monumental new documentary from director Julia Loktev (The Loneliest Planet), is, as its title suggests, a story that is still unfolding. "Part I" is an acclaimed 5.5 hour movie now playing in select theaters, including VTIFF. Loktev is currently filming and editing "Part II" as the stories of these courageous expat journalists continues to evolve. This screening on Sunday, February 1 presents My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow in full with a half-hour intermission.
"A masterpiece." —Film Comment
"A staggering portrait of Russian journalists in dissent." —The New Yorker
How do you keep fighting for the truth when your country declares you an outlaw? Julia Loktev's kinetic documentary, a brilliant vérité paranoid thriller, follows several journalists, mostly young women, during the fall and winter of 2021-2022. They and the outlet they work for, TV Rain, have been labeled "foreign agents" by Putin's regime, which requires all their reporting to include a ludicrous and severely enforced disclaimer. While the staff meet the designation with gallows humor, it means that they are increasingly subject to government surveillance and harassment. Most of the journalists try to continue living relatively normal lives, reporting truthfully on Russian politics while jumping through Kafkaesque bureaucratic hoops. What begins as an intimate epic about young Russian independent journalists fighting Putin’s regime takes a drastic turn when Russia invades Ukraine. As the walls close in and the crackdowns intensify, they must choose whether or not to leave their homeland and flee into exile.
My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow won Best Non-Fiction Film from the New York Film Critics Circle and Best Documentary Film from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. The film was also cited by NPR and The New Yorker critic Justin Change and New York Times critic Manohla Dargis's as one of the top 10 movies of the year.