Julia Loktev’s Landmark Documentary Continues In Trailer for My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile

About as anticipated as a six-hour documentary on exiled Russian journalists gets, Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile—the follow-up to 2024’s Last Air in Moscow, the winner of our Indie Film Site Network Advocate Award—has seemingly proved worthy of all the time needed onscreen and off, all the while accumulating executive producers Laura Poitras and Meryl Streep. After a Venice premiere and ahead of a New York Film Festival showing that itself predates an October 9 opening at Film Forum, the first trailer has arrived.

As Savina Petkova said in our Critic’s Pick review out of Venice, “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.”

Here’s the synopsis: “When Russia shuts down all independent media, a group of young dissident journalists must flee Moscow so they can keep reporting and not go to prison. In her riveting follow-up to last year’s awards-sweeping MY UNDESIRABLE FRIENDS — LAST AIR IN MOSCOW, Julia Loktev tracks these courageous, sharply funny women (and a few men) as they fan out across a dozen countries, to Istanbul, Tbilisi, Prague, Vienna, Amsterdam, New York, and beyond. Over the course of four years, they continue to report the truth to Russians from exile, covering their country’s war crimes, even as they face death threats and are declared extremists and terrorists — as they find new meanings of family, friendship, love, and home far from the country to which they may never return. (Viewers can follow EXILE without first seeing LAST AIR IN MOSCOW.)”

Find preview and poster below: