Day 1,645 of Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine also brings us the world premiere of Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile, the follow-up to My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow (2024). War time is even more elastic than peace time, even though it’s only accessible to those living through it. For us, viewers huddled in the screening rooms or hunched over the laptops if we’re streaming, this concept remains abstract. Instead we count film time in hours and minutes, the only measure we can access directly: Last Air in Moscow clocked in at 324 minutes, and Exile is longer at 355. But how precious is our viewing time, really, in comparison to what the total 12 hours of My Undesirable Friends depicts, the fascistic suffocation of truth in real time?
The first film began in autumn 2021, when independent journalists—our protagonists—were being declared “foreign agents” by Putin’s regime. In four months’ time they were fleeing the country as Russia started a full-scale war in Ukraine, making their journalistic work punishable with jail time. Exile starts only two days after the events depicted in Last Air in Moscow, circa March 2022, providing the continuity we need for history to make sense. There is no gap between Parts I and II, yet they are worlds apart—for those we see onscreen and us watching real time unfold with a three-year delay.
What we’re seeing are brave, resourceful young women who are no less scared, shocked, and trying to plan their next move out of Russia. However, it’s a relief to see all of them alive and well. Regardless of whether or not you’ve already spent hours with Anya (Anna Nemzer, credited as co-director), Lera (Valeria Ratnikova), Ksyusha (Ksenia Mironova), Lena (Elena Kostyucheko), Ira (Irina Dolinina), Alesya (Marokhovskaya), and Sonya (Groysman), Loktev’s affection is palpable from behind the camera. Shooting on an iPhone allows her, like in Part I, to stay close and bottle the intimacy shared, which in this case it feels even more precious to preserve.
When Last Air in Moscow prmieered, critics remarked on Loktev’s transition from fiction to documentary as a novelty, yet were somewhat unsurprised to find the same delicate framing and attention to faces, flushed with emotion, one sees in the director’s works of fiction. A nimble camera staying close by, attending to every word each of the film’s multiple protagonists utters, taking in the surroundings as the final glimpses of Moscow for each and every one of them—streets, apartments, workplaces. Stylistically, Exile is no different, but watching it feels more claustrophobic, the camerawork more propulsive and shaky, as if it too is trying to make sense of that new, exilic reality. All those who worked together at TV Rain as one of the last (and very few) oppositional media in Russia have scattered—some fled to Europe via Turkey, others to Georgia—and splintered. Now that the media has shut down, it’s Loktev and her film keeping them close. But that uniting role is neither overstated nor forced. It’s welcome, and the trust between filmmaker and subjects is clearly felt in every second of screen time—including the “new faces” like Yana (Kuchina, partner of Lena) and the Ukrainian-Russian journalist couple Peter Ruzavin and Nataliya Gumenyuk, who also fit right in the constellation of fearless protagonists with their impressive work and sweet humor.
Like its predecessor, My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile shows history in the making by documenting fragments of its peoples’ lives, reflections, and struggles against the authoritarian state, but also exceeds the expectations of your regular observational documentary. Loktev has described the approach as a “fly in the soup” more than “fly on the wall,” but by staying with her protagonists, she extends the act of care so crucial for the genre beyond any time and space of shooting. She translates her care to the audience as one of bearing witness, actively with her own voice in dialogue with a protagonist, or more discreetly by just being there. Unlike them, Loktev may be free to travel, but that asymmetry doesn’t make her presence any less reassuring—filming, as an act and a process, becomes the only source of stability for all, it seems.
Exile also crystallizes history’s relationship to the present tense and time in general. Despite offering clear timestamps and contextual information in the inter-titles, the film inadvertently places viewers in a state of dissonance. Not a cognitive one, but temporal—and by extension, mnemonic—dissonance where the present is past, yet still present. While there is a chronological narrative of sorts, moving from March 2022 to early 2026, the emotional timeline is anything but linear. Loktev’s editing bookends every scene with a black frame and inter-titles containing a place, time, and protagonist, yet the mosaic of trauma and resistance defies the sense of linear time. We, as viewers, get to experience again the first news of Bucha, Irpin, and Mariupol, mass graves, and accounts of torture by the Russian army—all squashed in our memory by the innumerable atrocities of war committed ever since.
As Julia Loktev follows her protagonists in exile to Turkey, Georgia, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and the United States, what in any other film could be a chronicle of homes and places becomes a cartography of grief and displacement. Exile tastes as bitter as the collective responsibility of its protagonists, whose acute sense of accountability (“we let this happen” are words uttered by several people) clashes with the ambivalence of being Russian today. Still, the strength of their convictions is the driving force behind My Undesirable Friends, the urge to never forget that history is made here and now.
My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival and opens on October 9.
The post Venice Review: My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile Is an Epic Continuation of Julia Loktev’s Fearless, Endlessly Compassionate Portrait first appeared on The Film Stage.
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