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My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow (2024) by Julia Loktev

The last journalists standing — and the moment everything changed

Julia Loktev — Soviet-born, American filmmaker — returned to Moscow in fall 2021 to document independent journalists being branded "foreign agents" by Putin's regime. She filmed on her phone, alone, in apartments. What began as a portrait of press freedom under siege became, without warning, a front-row document of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the final hours of its last independent media.

Why It Is Trending: The Best Documentary of 2024 Arrives in US Cinemas on April 3, 2026

Screen International's Tim Grierson named it the #1 Documentary of 2024. IndieWire graded it A−, calling it a scary and riveting portrait of Russia's last independent news channel. Metascore of 93 — one of the highest-rated documentaries in years. At the Gotham Independent Film Awards 2025, it won Best Documentary Feature. It was shortlisted for Best Documentary Feature at the 98th Academy Awards. The film premiered at the New York Film Festival 2024 Main Slate and had its international premiere at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale Special) in February 2025. US theatrical release via Film Forum, April 3, 2026. Part II — Exile is in production.

Elements Driving the Trend: Loktev shot entirely on her phone — alone, at the subjects' request, in their apartments — achieving an intimacy that crew-based documentary cannot manufacture. The five-chapter, 5-hour 24-minute structure mirrors the slow accumulation of the repression it documents: monotony becomes thematic. The classical dramatic tension is devastating — we the audience know what is coming before the journalists on screen do, watching their youth disappear in the film's final two chapters as they race to flee the country in the hours after the invasion is announced.

Virality: The film's five-and-a-half-hour runtime became its own cultural conversation — with Letterboxd audiences reporting watching it over three days and calling it "maybe the most gripping five-and-a-half hours of anything I've watched." The American parallel — one IMDb user called it a "visit from Dickens' ghost of Christmas future" — drives urgent contemporary resonance.

Critics Reception: IndieWire A−: an addictive thriller. Little White Lies: one of cinema's most important recent documents. Rotten Tomatoes: urgent, visceral, intimate. Slant: 3/4, finding the first two chapters unfocused but the crescendo devastating. Screen International: best documentary of 2024.

Awards and Recognitions: 4 wins and 10 nominations total. Gotham Independent Film Awards 2025 — Best Documentary Feature. 98th Academy Awards shortlist — Best Documentary Feature. NYFF 2024 Main Slate premiere. Berlinale Special, February 2025. Independent Spirit Award nominated. US theatrical release Film Forum, April 3, 2026.

My Undesirable Friends arrives in US cinemas at the exact moment its subject matter — press freedom under authoritarian pressure — is most culturally and politically urgent for American audiences. Its timing is not calculated. It is simply the reality of how long it takes a 5-hour documentary to find its distribution.

What Movie Trend Is Followed: The Vérité Documentary as Historical Record and Political Warning

My Undesirable Friends belongs to the tradition of long-form observational documentary — Wiseman's institutional films, Rivette's epic character studies — but uniquely fuses vérité intimacy with the structural tension of a thriller whose ending the audience already knows. Structured in five chapters, feeling like a cross between a Russian novel and a reality show about frighteningly real reality, it is an extraordinary historic record of a country on the verge of fascism and an immediate, specific warning to any democracy that believes it couldn't happen there. The phone-camera aesthetic — chosen organically when the subjects said they preferred one body in the room — transforms a technical limitation into a formal statement about the nature of testimony.

Trend Drivers: The Right Filmmaker in the Right Place at the Right Moment Loktev arrived four months before the invasion with no way to know what was coming. She stayed through the first week of the full-scale war, filming until independent journalism became impossible. The result is not just a documentary about press freedom — it is a document of the exact moment a free society stopped being one, filmed by someone who was there. That the film exists at all is the most important fact about it.

What Is Influencing Trend: Long-form documentary — from The Act of Killing to Shoah — has a proven capacity to sustain extended runtimes when the subject demands it. The global conversation about press freedom and authoritarian creep has created an audience for exactly this kind of urgent political documentary. Film Forum's theatrical positioning gives the film the critical platform its Gotham and Berlinale recognition warrants.

Macro Trends Influencing: The attack on press freedom is no longer a foreign-country story for American audiences — it is their immediate political context. Ukrainian documentary, Russian exile media, and European press freedom journalism have all found expanded audiences since 2022. Long-form documentary is experiencing a streaming and theatrical revival, with audiences willing to commit to extended runtimes for films of genuine historical weight.

Consumer Trends Influencing: The Letterboxd community's embrace of the film — driven by its NYFF reputation and the word-of-mouth of those who watched it over multiple sessions — has made it one of the most anticipated US theatrical releases of early 2026 among documentary audiences. The Gotham win and Academy shortlist give it mainstream awards visibility. The American parallel that viewers are drawing — "ghost of Christmas future" — gives the film a domestic urgency that foreign-subject documentaries rarely generate.

Audience Analysis: Documentary Devotees, Press Freedom Advocates, and Anyone Watching Democracy Under Pressure The core audience is 25–65 — documentary cinephiles, journalists, political observers, and anyone following the global authoritarian turn with the specific anxiety of someone who recognises the pattern. Russian diaspora audiences find the film personally devastating — the IMDb review from a Russian viewer calling it a reminder that their country still has such people — and American audiences find it prophetic. The five-hour commitment filters for exactly the audience the film rewards: those willing to sit with discomfort long enough to understand it.

Final Verdict: My Undesirable Friends Is the Most Important Documentary of Its Year — a Historical Document, a Political Warning, and a Profound Act of Friendship

Loktev delivers what may be the definitive document of Putin's destruction of Russian civil society — made from the inside, in real time, by a filmmaker who stayed when she could have left. The first two chapters are sometimes unfocused; the final two are among the most devastating sequences in contemporary documentary. The journalists' youth visibly disappearing from their faces in the film's last hours is one of 2024's most haunting cinematic images. It is essential viewing — and not only because of what it documents.

Audience Relevance: For Anyone Who Needs to Understand How a Free Press Dies The film documents repression not as sudden violence but as accumulated pressure — the monotony of restrictions that build until leaving is the only option left. That process is the film's subject and its method: monotony becomes thematic, restraint becomes argument.

Loktev's genius is making audiences understand that the journalists' gallows humor, their Harry Potter obsessions, their dogs' names — all of it is the story, not a distraction from it.

What Is the Message: Resistance Is Possible, Until It Suddenly Isn't — and Then It Continues From Elsewhere "Let joy and laughter be part of our resistance," one journalist says — and the film holds that line as its moral centre even as everything falls apart. The sequel — Part II: Exile — will pick up where these journalists continue from outside Russia.

The film's final chapter is not a defeat. It is a relocation. That distinction is the most hopeful thing Loktev could have given her subjects, and her audience.

Relevance to Audience: A Film That Americans Need More Than Its Original Audience Did Multiple reviewers noted the American parallel explicitly. One IMDb user called it a "visit from Dickens' ghost of Christmas future" — are these visions of things that must be, or may be only? The film's resonance for American audiences in 2026 is not metaphorical but structural: the same tools, the same designations, the same incremental normalisation.

That resonance is why its US theatrical release in April 2026 matters more than its 2024 festival premiere.

Social Relevance: TV Rain Is Now Operating From the Netherlands. This Film Is Why. The subjects of the film — the journalists of TV Rain and their independent colleagues — are real people whose real lives were upended by the events the film documents. TV Rain now broadcasts from Amsterdam. Several of the film's subjects have been accused of extremism and terrorism by the Russian government.

The film's social relevance is not thematic but literal: these are the people, this is what happened, this is still happening.

Performance: Eight Journalists Who Became, Unavoidably, the Year's Most Important Documentary Subjects Anna Nemzer, Sonya Groysman, Olya Churakova, Irina Dolinina, Alesya Marokhovskaya, Ksenia Mironova, Elena Kostyuchenko, Daniil Sotnikov — none of them are performing. They are working, laughing, eating, and then, in the film's final hours, evacuating. That transition — from professional to refugee, from journalist to exile — is the film's central drama and its most devastating documentary achievement.

Legacy: The Film That Was in the Right Place at the Right Moment — and Knew What It Was Witnessing My Undesirable Friends will be studied alongside The Act of Killing and Shoah as a documentary that changed what the form is capable of documenting. Its five-and-a-half hours are not an obstacle but an argument: some things require this long to fully understand.

Part II — Exile is in production. The story is not over.

Success: Gotham Best Documentary, Berlinale Special, Academy Shortlist, Metascore 93 4 wins and 10 nominations. Gotham Independent Film Awards 2025 — Best Documentary Feature. 98th Academy Awards shortlist — Best Documentary Feature. Independent Spirit Award nominated. NYFF 2024 Main Slate. Berlinale Special, February 2025. Metascore 93. US theatrical release Film Forum, April 3, 2026.

My Undesirable Friends is not a film about Russia. It is a film about what happens when people who love their country more than their government are forced to choose.

Insights Industry: Loktev's decision to shoot alone on a phone — driven by her subjects' comfort, not a stylistic brief — produced the most intimate political documentary of the decade and confirms that access is the most valuable resource in non-fiction filmmaking. Audience: The five-hour runtime is a filter that selects for exactly the audience that will never forget the film — and the Letterboxd, Gotham, and Academy recognition confirms that audience exists and is ready to make the commitment. Social: A documentary about journalists branded "foreign agents" and forced into exile arrives in the US in April 2026 at a moment when the phrase "enemy of the people" has re-entered American political vocabulary — and no viewer will miss the parallel. Cultural: My Undesirable Friends is the most important documentary about the destruction of press freedom since The Death of Stalin — and unlike that film, it is not a satire. It is a record. The distinction matters more now than it ever has.

My Undesirable Friends: Part I is the first half of a story that is still being written — by journalists who refused to stop, from cities they didn't choose, in a world that wasn't supposed to work this way.

Summary: Eight Journalists, One Phone Camera, Five Chapters, and the Moment Russia Stopped Being Russia

  • Movie themes: Press freedom, authoritarian repression, the "foreign agent" designation as a tool of state violence, exile, resilience, and the specific courage of people who keep reporting when reporting becomes illegal.

  • Movie director: Julia Loktev — Soviet-born, American filmmaker, 13 years between features — returns with the most important documentary of her career, shot alone on a phone, structured with the patience and precision of a Russian novel.

  • Top casting: Anna Nemzer, Sonya Groysman, Olya Churakova, and six colleagues — real journalists whose real lives form the film's five-chapter structure. Their courage is the film's only subject and its entire argument.

  • Awards and recognition: Gotham Independent Film Awards 2025 — Best Documentary Feature. 98th Academy Awards shortlist — Best Documentary Feature. Independent Spirit Award nominated. NYFF 2024 Main Slate. Berlinale Special, February 2025. 4 wins and 10 nominations total. US theatrical release Film Forum, April 3, 2026.

  • Why to watch: The most important documentary of 2024 — a five-and-a-half-hour historical record of the exact moment Russia's last independent media stopped existing, made by the only filmmaker who was there, with the intimacy of a friend and the authority of a witness.

  • Key success factors: Loktev's access plus the phone-camera intimacy plus the devastating dramatic irony of footage shot before the invasion plus the film's American resonance in 2026 — a combination that makes it both historically essential and immediately urgent.

  • Where to watch: Film Forum theatrical release — US wide April 3, 2026.


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