It Was the Best Documentary of 2025. The Follow-Up Is Just as Riveting, Urgent—and Inspiring.

Movies A Riveting New Movie Offers an Urgent—and Inspiring—Message About the Fight for America My Undesirable Friends is finally complete. It’s gripping from start to finish. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Sam Adams? Oct 09, 202612:56 PM Mubi Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. At one point in My Undesirable Friends: Part II—Exile, Julia Loktev’s nearly six-hour documentary about Russian journalists struggling to cover their country’s descent into full-bore authoritarianism, the fate of Russian’s only independent news broadcaster hinges on the use of a pronoun. It’s a few hours into this part of the story, following the five gripping and unsettling hours of Part I—Last Air in Moscow, and the remnants of the once-bustling network TV Rain have been reconstituted in Latvia, where thousands of Russians fled after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Their army’s brutality has made Russians, even those who opposed Putin’s regime, a controversial presence in European countries, and although the Latvian government has granted Rain the right to broadcast from within its borders, officials seem to be looking for a way to walk back an unpopular decision. So they seize on a single phrase: “our soldiers.” The argument is absurd, suggesting that because Rain is broadcasting from Latvia, viewers might believe the term, spoken in Russian by a Russian, refers to the Latvian army, and not to Russian troops. But the charge sticks, and the movie’s subjects find themselves, once again, looking for a place they can even temporarily call home. As it happens, “our soldiers” was used in the course of reporting that Russian troops were committing war crimes in Ukraine—a way of accepting responsibility for their actions, despite the fact that TV Rain’s journalists opposed the invasion right up to the point where it became unsafe to do so within Russia’s borders. Part I ends with most of Loktev’s subjects packing up and leaving within a matter of hours as it becomes clear that the moment they’d hoped would never come was unavoidably upon them. Even as they reported each day on the steady march of Putin’s tyranny, they lived what remained of their lives as best they could, gathering in one another’s apartments and swapping references to Gossip Girl and Harry Potter. Part II begins almost immediately thereafter, as those journalists flee with hastily packed suitcases and scatter around the world, watching from afar as the country they love disintegrates. But even as they leave their old lives behind, some are still haunted by the idea that they didn’t do enough to stop it. “Of course, we are guilty,” says the TV Rain anchor Anna Nemzer, who at that point in the film has resettled in Tel Aviv with her husband and daughter. (She is also credited as the film’s co-director.) “Of course, we failed and let this happen.” It’s fair to say that Loktev, who was born in the Soviet Union and raised in Colorado, doesn’t share that dim view of her subjects’ efforts. They are, as the title indicates, her friends, and after a while, they start to feel like ours, too. Perhaps they did fail at the impossible task of stopping the war, or of dethroning Putin, in the way that people whose only power is to speak the truth often do. But Loktev finds a kind of ordinary heroism in their endurance, the way the young journalist Ksenia Mironova pushes forward after her fiancé, the former military affairs journalist Ivan Safronov, is arrested on charges of treason and sentenced to 22 years in prison, or the way Elena Kostyuchenko, who covered the war in Ukraine for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, goes from surviving a suspected poisoning by the Kremlin to authoring a bestselling book in exile. Stick with them as long as Loktev does, and they will eventually find a way to carry on. And because My Undesirable Friends, all 11 combined hours of it, allows us to live through that struggle alongside them—even when the obstacles are as mundane as running out of fresh underwear or fumbling with the keypad lock on a rented apartment while the timer on the stairway lights run out—it feels especially fulfilling when the smoke begins to clear. Unsurprisingly, Exile lacks the shaggy hangout charm of its predecessor—its characters are now permanent remote workers, involuntary digital nomads hosting podcasts with colleagues Zooming in from Ukraine. But we gain more insight into who they are as individuals, and the differences in their backgrounds are thrown into stark relief by their change in circumstance. Nemzer, we learn, is married to the co-founder of a podcast company and is the daughter of a prominent Solzhenitsyn scholar; when she reluctantly concedes that it’s time to let her apartment in Moscow go, she asks a friend to pack up the books with her parents’ names on the spine. It’s like paying the first visit to the home of a co-worker you’ve known for years, throwing everything you know about them into a slightly different light. In a sense, Loktev’s exiles are all in the same boat, but some are paddling with bigger oars. That relative good fortune, however, only deepens their feelings of culpability. “We wanted to have a nice life,” Kostyuchenko reflects. “Look what bloodshed it came to, this desire for comfort.” When Last Air in Moscow was released in theaters last year, Mironova, who has now resettled in New York, described the uncanny sensation of watching the U.S. follow her country down the road to fascism. “This is exactly what was going on in Russia 20 years ago,” she told me. Exile is a view from the end of that road, and a warning about the dangers of protecting normalcy at all costs. Near the end of Exile, an American asks Kostyuchenko what we can learn from her experience. “Stay alarmed,” Kostyuchenko warns. “Be hysterical if you need to. It’s very easy to lose your country.” Journalism Russia Vladimir Putin Democracy Documentaries Ukraine