Julia Loktev’s 13-year absence since The Loneliest Planet was once a blemish on film culture; now it’s almost hard to remember. Her role as an artist saw some kind of renaissance with the unveiling of My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, a document of journalists whose role in Putin’s Russia deteriorates, over the course of five-and-a-half hours, from mere thorn in the regime’s side to outright-hostile element. The clichéd explanations of what Loktev got up to here—critics loved saying it was “like a thriller” or “novelistic”—while perhaps a bit trite, aren’t so inaccurate; in its sprawl and steadily accumulating dread, the film felt closer to first-person experience than clinical observation.
This, as its subtitle suggests, was only the beginning. With Part II — Exile, Putin’s war has begun and Loktev’s subjects have fled Russia under cover of night, spreading across continents and trying to reconcile their upheaved lives with a home country’s irredeemable present. While arguably even more uncompromising—longer in length, with more figures and concerns—her film arrives with a tad more pedigree: Meryl Streep has joined Laura Poitras as an executive producer, and a theatrical release was set concurrent with its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival. Between its North American debut at the New York Film Festival and October 9 opening at Film Forum, I spoke with Loktev about Exile as a work of both form and prescience.
The Film Stage: Okay, I think I have it recording on both my computer and my phone, so we should be set. I don’t know if it counts, Julia, as good journalistic practice to record multiple places.
Julia Loktev: No, absolutely. I think if you record it in both, that’s actually—I support that. I always try to have as many microphones as possible.
Right.
Because one will run out of batteries and fail.
Yes, yes. I was reading the press notes and had forgotten the anecdote about you uploading footage from the first movie over Russian hotel Wi-Fi, which: I would have just stuck a gun in my mouth. You’re much braver than me.
You got to do what you got to do. [Laughs] You have to. I wasn’t going to go to the airport with the only copy! That was not an option. I was like: I can leave when this is uploaded and when it’s been downloaded in New York.
How are you feeling now that Part II is brought into the world?
Good. You know, a little disoriented, but good.
I saw the movie on Saturday—saw it in a theater, did the whole jag of it—and it’s been, honestly, such a privilege seeing these movies and talking to you about them. I wouldn’t put this in the piece because I need to seem professional, but I was —
You won’t say nice things because you have to seem professional? Like, you’re banned? [Laughs] It’s like Lana says: journalists have to be impartial, so you can’t say —
No, no, just that I was somewhat misty-eyed at the final title cards, thinking about—and I say that as somebody who’s spent a fraction of the time with them that you have, and from a distance—but the cumulative power of the last 12-ish hours has just been amazing.
But why can’t you put that in the piece, I wonder? Because film is supposed to work on an emotional level. Are you supposed to be rational and detached? Actually, the film is about people and their lives and it’s about larger historical things, but we live through it with all our messy emotions. So I encourage you to.
Thank you. I thought it was useful to look back at the conversation that we had a couple years ago. In these press notes, you also say this thing about how, obviously, the war starts and you leave the country with them. You don’t think of this as, “Okay, now I’m making Part II,” right? But there was something about the first film’s internal metronome that changed once there’s the sense a war is going to begin. In this movie, the war has begun. You talk about the exhaustion here, the adrenaline of going from country to country. Did you find that changed your approach to anything—how you were shooting it, how you were interacting with your subjects, something more alchemical?
I think there’s an inherently different metronome to it. It’s an inherently different kind of story, where Last Air in Moscow all takes place in Moscow. It takes place over four-and-a-half months, where we see a society in the last months where it’s possible to walk and live out in the open, opposing the government and to speak openly—right before that becomes impossible. Nobody, of course, knew that in those months, and then it becomes impossible and everyone has to flee. And that has its own kind of rhythm. Then begins the “now what,” where Exile picks up two days later in exile. It takes place over 12 different countries.
The time of it is indefinite. It’s about the long haul. It’s about how you keep going. It’s not a single plot with a culmination, but it’s more made up of many, many plots. It’s a kind of condition. It’s not a single, “Oh, here’s this event.” It’s made up of many plots and many challenges as one thing happens after another. This was not my thought [Laughs] but it was someone else’s thought that I’m now co-opting: somebody made a parallel to The Odyssey, which is about somebody trying to eventually get home through different events. There’s no one-eyed monster—we only have two-eyed monsters in the film—but it’s made up of all these things that happen to these journalists as they continue to try to figure out, “What now? How do we continue doing our job, fulfilling our duty, bringing information to Russians about this criminal war that Russia is waging?” as they go from country to country to country.
There’s a dozen countries, so it has an inherently different kind of structure, rhythm, time. It’s four-and-a-half years. It’s a different kind of challenge. The long haul and the keeping attention and the keeping working when it seems not that fruitful is actually much more interesting to me than the singular moment. We’re used to the singular “here’s the news event!” and then our attention drifts, but it’s actually all the texture of things in a long-term, challenging situation that is much more fascinating to me.
You had said when we talked, “It’s not a film about the war; it’s a film about the society that made this war.” Now there’s this disbursement of the products of that society into the larger world. I found the film genuinely, at times, kind of scary. Maybe that seems like a facile response, but —
I doubt it’s a facile response. I’m more interested in “scary” how—tell me.
Well, there’s the whole thing with the Masha character, where that title card comes up and it’s just: “Oh, fuck.” Or you’re following this journalist Elena Kostyuchenko for a long while, up-close-and-center with her, and then there’s this outside, third-person news story about her being poisoned. It’s this weird effect where you keep running from danger but it’s coming closer and closer to you, an encroaching thing. And do with this whatever you will, but in the scene at Harvard with the presentation of 60 Minutes, and how that show has become so perverted under its new regime. Just yesterday, the Paramount/Warner thing gets announced, right? It feels like you’re documenting things as the cliffside is falling away. That’s more a comment than a question, but it’s on my mind.
No, those are different kinds of scary, and they’re kind of two different observations about specific things that are scary. [Laughs] I think they’re important to at least tap into or talk through. Yeah, for most of these characters, when they left Russia, they had a sense of, immediately, “Now I’m safe. Now I can do my work. I no longer worry every moment about police showing up at my door.” And then slowly they realize that they’re not really going to be entirely safe anywhere because Russia continues to pursue them; they have to be wary of people who enter their midst.
And this stuff surprises me, still, as much as I’ve been in the middle of it. The other day I read a story in The Guardian about a plot uncovered in the U.S.—which was generally considered safer than, for example, Europe; Russian secret services don’t operate as freely here—of assassination plots against dissident Russians in the U.S. being uncovered. The way they work—and there’s been a lot about this—is not like the professional spies of our old movies where they’re highly trained, but they work—there was a New Yorker article about this—through these one-time-use, almost like the Taskrabbit of spycraft [Laughs] where they will hire people who are not politically committed or not necessarily all that professionally trained to do things. To sabotage, and possibly poison, or other things in connection with organized crime.
So it is the sense, I think, for all the characters—some have been followed, threatened, poisoned—and that’s just the fabric of their everyday life now. That’s just a possibility. Meanwhile, of course for many of them, they’ve had criminal cases against them in Russia; they’ve had their parents’ homes searched; some have been declared extremists and terrorists, convicted in absentia for talking about Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine. So yeah: that’s just how they live now and they continue to work.
Meanwhile, life goes on: people fall in love, fall out of love, peoples’ parents die, peoples’ children grow up, there’s friendships and all the texture of life that makes… life as you’re trying to work. That’s kind of a lot of what the film is about. But going back to the other thing of what you said: yeah, the film keeps getting more relevant every day. [Laughs] I open up the news every day and Trump said there’s something wrong with a country that allows people to write negative stories! Apparently he thinks journalism should only be nice and positive. We should only talk about nice things. Of course, right now I’m thinking a lot about echoes that I find terrifying with the filmmakers of NAZA, who I think have just done something tremendous and incredible, but they’re now in a situation where they’re facing the possibility—they’re facing threats, and also the long-term thing of: they may not be able to go home.
The question then: “What do we do from exile? What do we do from abroad?” Which is, strangely, the position the characters in the film have been in for talking about their country’s war crimes. There’s this terrifying echoing there for me, and I’m thinking about them all the time now.
Of course. I spent this distant, fractioned time with them and still felt that emotional kinetic energy throughout. It’s all these dangers that are far away but feel like they’re getting closer. Yet you capture life as it is in these European countries so wonderfully that, in a strange way, it made me pine—the feeling of life on the street, even just the lighting on the street, seeing people through windows. There’s a greater plurality of places and textures than Last Air in Moscow. How much are you working to show a beautiful but foreign land as a comment on, a counterpoint to the first film, or is that coming out of something else?
It’s funny for me to hear you say that. It’s really funny [Laughs] actually. I mean, first of all: I don’t shoot cutaways. I don’t shoot shots of the street. When you see Moscow in Last Air in Moscow, it’s in the window behind someone in a car. I never just shoot Moscow. But the reason I laughed at this Exile thing is because I actually think it’s kind of incredible: the film takes place in 12 countries, and they all look the same to me because they all look like the same kind of “not home” apartment. Like, the same gray IKEA couch. You don’t see the cities that much. So I was surprised to hear you say that [Laughs] because I’m not focusing on the city. I’m focusing on where the people are, which is in their sad apartment, usually, and often at work, and it’s like: where are they? It’s almost a sense of “non-place” even though it’s in 12 countries.
But of course you do catch it. You catch Istanbul outside the window. It’s always around the characters. It’s that thing that so many filmmakers… I mean, the normal thing for a filmmaker to do is shoot the street. I don’t do that. I don’t just shoot pretty shots of the street. I don’t shoot cutaways. I just shoot the characters, so if they happen to walk down the street, you get whatever street you get with them. But other than that, it’s really so focused on their intimate world.
You’re clarifying what I felt but couldn’t articulate: it conveys the sense of travel and transit—of being in an airport at 5:00 a.m. as the sun rises, taking a cab into the city, standing on a street, and it’s cold and you’re tired, but the force of the place is waking you up somehow.
Right. No, and there’s a lot of movement in the film—a lot of airports and train stations—and most of the characters have moved countries several times. There’s really only two characters who left and went to one place, and the only reason they went to the one place is because their editor at the time had already been threatened in Russia with arrest, and so he left a few months before the full-scale invasion and set up a base in Prague. But everyone else moved countries two, three, four, five, six times, so there is this constant sense of motion and “not home.”
Around the halfway point, we’re in New York—Anya goes to Harlem. Now I’m thinking about you as the director because it’s in your city—not necessarily the same thing as being in Moscow with an iPhone—but I couldn’t necessarily detect an aesthetic change. Did you start shooting on new, higher-tech equipment with more resources, or was there a desire to maintain uniformity?
I upgraded the iPhone every time a new one came out. [Laughs] That was kind of the extent of it. We’d get a couple more microphones. But definitely I just kept shooting. Really, I try to make it so there’s not an aesthetic imposing itself on something that is external. It’s more about how I feel things as I’m shooting and composing a shot in that moment—just responding with a camera to the emotions of a person.
Photo by Richard Jopson, courtesy of New York Film Festival.
Two years ago you mentioned needing to keep filming if something happened, like Putin dying. Two months later, Trump gets re-elected; you filmed the inauguration. Then the footage goes all the way to March of this year. During that event at your home in December, I heard mention that the last section was being edited. Then more is filmed months later. In so many words: how did you know when to stop?
The last scene was in April of this year. And it was the kind of thing where I knew it was going to happen, but I didn’t know exactly when, so I was waiting for it. It just seemed like, you know, I wanted to leave off as close as possible to the film’s release. It could keep going for years, but I think this tells the story from the immediate triage days of exile to where it becomes, like, the last chapter is called “The Normal Not Normal” where things are happening; people are getting convicted in absentia; they’re getting followed, poisoned, and that becomes the new normal and you just keep working. That is “the normal not normal” for now. I mean, we have this fantasy that maybe there will a Part III, but if and when—and it may be decades away—people are ever able to return, because nobody is able to go back to Russia now because they’ll be arrested at the airport, pretty much every character, If not worse.
It would be great to film that movie. We’d love that movie. But it may not be for a long time. So this seemed like… who knows what will happen tomorrow? Maybe something will happen [Laughs] and I’ll be like “must start filming again.” But for now, it feels like a good leaving-off point.
As an American, I could only snap-to with the inauguration stuff. It feels like it could be its own movie, or at least some sustained document. You filmed someone talking about “post-birth abortion.”
You’ve heard that term before?!
Of course! It felt like you were pinpointing a certain state-produced paranoia and fear à la Putin. I don’t want to answer my own question here, but I’d like to know your thinking on what to capture and emphasize without making it an obvious “aren’t these people stupid” or “isn’t it so obvious we’re next”? The balance of that is very interesting to me.
The balance of that is hard. But let’s look at what actually happens in the scene. It’s not that I am running around interviewing this guy [Laughs] talking about post-birth abortion. It’s literally one of the main characters—who was one of the, probably, leading characters in Last Air in Moscow, Ksyusha [Mironova], and she continues to be a character throughout this story. She moves to New York, she’s going to film school, studying broadcast journalism at the New York Film Academy. Ksyusha says to me, “So, on inauguration day, I want to go down and film on the streets” and I’m like, “On inauguration day, I want to cry under a blanket, thank you very much. I do not want to be anywhere there.” But I felt like this was so… I felt like this is where I have to do my duty as a filmmaker, honestly. That was a hard thing for me, just being honest, because I did not want to. Being on the streets of DC surrounded by people who were so, so happy that day was not where I wanted to spend inauguration day.
Ksyusha at one point turned around and I was crying. Literally I just started crying because everyone was so happy. But I thought, “Okay, one of my main protagonists is here interviewing happy Trump supporters in a bar; I probably should be filming this and include this.” For the characters that did move to the States, the last couple of years have been startling because they thought they left this, and suddenly you’re seeing so many echoes here in the U.S. And I don’t want to be heavy-handed about it; I don’t think I have to reach that far to make the parallels.
Obviously, as Tolstoy said: each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and we should remember this—that there are specifics to each situation—but I think, for them, it’s been this echoing. Ksyusha talks about growing up and being a kid in the Obama era and being able to look at the U.S. and say, “Okay, in Russia, things are pretty fucked-up, but at least in America there’s hope.” I think that’s been a difficult thing to reckon with for the characters, but let’s face it: for all of us. Ksyusha didn’t cry; I cried. [Laughs] You know, that was just me behind the scenes. “I’m just gonna have an emotional moment now.” It was not an easy place to be.
But you don’t show yourself crying.
No, I do not show myself crying. That was just behind the scenes. I do not show myself crying in a bar as somebody’s talking about post-birth abortions. No, not part of the movie, thank God. I have some sense of appropriateness.
I was going to say you’re a better filmmaker than that.
Yes, yes, yes. [Laughs] Spoiler alert: you do not get to see me cry on the streets during the Trump inauguration. That’s just… that does not happen.
Well, it was a six-hour movie that held me rapt throughout—including needing to pee during both parts, but refusing to leave. Every scene started and I said, “Something’s already happening. I’ve got to keep going.” Let that be the endorsement. Forget Meryl Streep. “I did not go to the bathroom” is your endorsement.
That is the best endorsement ever! “I have held my pee.” What else can you wish for?
But a serious, sincere congratulations. Hopefully next time we’ll talk about a film that’s a bit happier. Or not! We don’t need to be happy.
That might be someone else! [Laughs] “Happy,” I don’t know. But there is joy in this film in the middle of all… the other things, I hope. There’s not happiness, but there is joy.
My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile opens on October 9.
The post “More Relevant Every Day”: Julia Loktev on My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile first appeared on The Film Stage.
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