My Undesirable Friends: Part I An Extraordinary Portrait Of Young Russian Journalists Fighting To Report The Truth

(MENAFN- The Conversation) Director Julia Loktev's“undesirable” friends are women, mostly in their 20s or early 30s, who live in Moscow. They all work for TV Rain (Dozhd') founded in 2010 as a lively, optimistic channel with cool programmes for a young audience, which also addressed more serious issues.

The Russian authorities tolerated the existence of TV Rain for over a decade, despite denouncing several of their programmes, which brazenly challenged Vladimir Putin's increasingly reactionary stance on social and political issues.

The society TV Rain was hoping to shape was a democratic world in which opposition leaders such as Boris Nemtsov (murdered in 2015) and Aleksei Navalny (poisoned with novichok in 2020, died in prison in 2024) would have been able to flourish. In this documentary, we watch as the possibility of that world moves further away.

Using an iPhone, Julia Loktev filmed her friends over four months in late 2021 and early 2022. The resulting documentary, lasting five and a half hours, provides an intimate picture of these young journalists' lives as they share their apprehensions about the worsening political situation, their struggles to cover what is happening in an environment of increasing censorship and their utter horror when Russia finally invaded Ukraine on February 22 2022.

Loktev's narration opens the film in 2021 as she drives through Moscow and announces that:“The world you're about to see no longer exists. None of us knew what was about to happen.” Her concluding text from early 2022 reports that:

In the film, we move from the TV Rain studios and clips of their news reports and talk shows, out into the streets, waiting outside police stations and prisons, and up into the women's apartments. Loktev records their ceaseless discussion of Russia's plight, the state's failure to respect people's constitutional rights, and abuses of power by the police and the judiciary.

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The journalists react in 2021 with dismay to the extension of a law intended to make it virtually impossible for journalists to work with any foreign organisations, let alone receive any funding. Those who are found to be working as such are officially designated a “foreign agent”, a designation that TV Rain and some of the women are hit with in August 2021.

A“foreign agent” must provide full accounts of all financial transactions, however trivial. They are also effectively banned from participation in political activity, or in any type of education. They also suffer a whole range of financial restrictions and penalties.

Every publication or mention in any media of a“foreign agent” must be accompanied by a lengthy, large-font label identifying them as such. This law has so far succeeded in gagging and disempowering over a thousand human rights organisations, media groups and individual citizens.

But even as these young journalists doggedly pursue the truth, we also share their everyday lives. We see them with their pets and bright nail varnish. They are shown baking cakes and with their kids and mums. They are constantly witty and inventive in their defiance of the authorities, proudly wearing their“foreign agent” T-shirts or concocting a subversive 2021 New Year's Eve broadcast to run alongside Putin's dreary and bellicose message to the Russian people.

All of this facetious defiance makes their white-faced reaction to the news that the invasion has begun all the more shattering. Almost immediately, they are informed that even to use the word“war” in relation to the Ukraine conflict is illegal, and that only official reports of events can be broadcast.

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Things get worse. The remarkable Ksenia Mironova's fiance the journalist Ivan Safronov is arrested on trumped-up charges after he investigates Russian defence contracts (for which he later receives a 22-year sentence). There is an exceptional strength of solidarity among Mironova and her friends, and they share her tears, as well as supporting her to continue her journalistic work.

Younger women, their mums, and older, hardened female human rights activists alike all share wise words and jokes, even as their world seems to be falling apart. This extraordinary film has garnered numerous awards, and immerses us in the lives of those who know they are on the brink of catastrophe.

As an expert on subversive and dissident Russian writers, I find it fascinating to see how satirical brilliance and deep courage can both emerge from the everyday messiness of young lives. The film poses urgent questions for the viewer about how to resist an oppressive state, how to support your family, friends and colleagues, and how best to judge the moment when it's time to run.

My Undesirable Friends: Part I is available to watch on Mubi

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