Julia Loktev on 'My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile'

Meryl Streep has joined Laura Poitras as an executive producer on Julia Loktev's My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile, a roughly six-hour documentary about Russian journalists living in exile. The film world-premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and opened in New York on October 9 at Film Forum, following its North American debut at the 64th New York Film Festival.

The sequel continues Part I — Last Air in Moscow, Loktev's five-and-a-half-hour portrait of independent journalists in Putin's Russia in the months before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Exile picks up two days after that film ends.

What shifts between Moscow and exile?

Loktev, who last directed a narrative feature with 2011's The Loneliest Planet, framed the new film's structural difference in plain terms. "Last Air in Moscow all takes place in Moscow," she told The Film Stage. "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."

Exile spreads across 12 countries over four-and-a-half years. "It's about the long haul," Loktev said. "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." A colleague drew a comparison to The Odyssey that she now claims: "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?'"

Why does the film feel "scary"?

The interviewer described an effect of running from danger as it draws closer. Loktev agreed and unpacked the texture of risk. "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,'" she said. "And then slowly they realize that they're not really going to be entirely safe anywhere because Russia continues to pursue them."

She cited recent reporting — a Guardian piece on an assassination plot uncovered in the U.S., a New Yorker article on Russian operations — and described operatives hired through "one-time-use, almost like the TaskRabbit of spycraft" arrangements for sabotage and poisoning. The journalist Elena Kostyuchenko, one of the film's central subjects, was poisoned while Loktev was filming. Several characters have been followed, convicted in absentia as extremists or terrorists, or had their parents' homes searched in Russia.

How was it shot?

Loktev upgraded her iPhone each time a new model came out. "That was kind of the extent of it," she said. "We'd get a couple more microphones." She rejected the notion that new locations demanded a new aesthetic. "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."

Across 12 countries, "they all look like the same kind of 'not home' apartment. Like, the same gray IKEA couch." The final scene was shot in April 2026. Loktev's closing chapter is titled "The Normal Not Normal," describing in absentia convictions and poisonings that have become routine. "People are getting followed, poisoned, and that becomes the new normal and you just keep working."

What about the American footage?

Ksyusha Mironova, one of the protagonists of Part I, moved to New York for film school. On inauguration day, she told Loktev she wanted to film on the streets of Washington. "I felt like this is where I have to do my duty as a filmmaker," Loktev said. "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."

She started filming anyway. "Ksyusha turned around and I was crying. Literally I just started crying because everyone was so happy." The footage made it into the film; her tears did not. "Spoiler alert: you do not get to see me cry on the streets during the Trump inauguration. That's just... that does not happen."

Is there a Part III?

Loktev allows the possibility, tied to a condition none of her subjects can meet. "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."

She ended the conversation on a deliberately un-summarizable note. Asked whether the film carries any happiness, she said: "There's not happiness, but there is joy." Her interviewer, who watched both parts back to back, offered an unconventional endorsement: "I have held my pee." Loktev called it "the best endorsement ever."