At the end of My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, Julia Loktev’s riveting documentary portrayal of Russian independent journalists attempting to report the truth behind Putin’s lies, Russia has just invaded Ukraine, and the film’s subjects are preparing to flee the country they love. If they’ll make it out, where they’ll end up, and whether they’ll be able to continue doing their work are all ominous question marks hovering in the air as they scramble to book flights to countries that don’t require visas and will still allow planes from Russia to land.
My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile picks up two days after Last Air in Moscow left off, and reintroduces the small group of main characters we got to know like friends over the course of the first film’s five-hour-plus running time. This second film is even longer, clocking in at close to six hours, and covers a longer span of time, stretching from the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2022 through Trump’s second inauguration in 2025—an uncomfortable reminder that Russia is not the only nation thrall to a strong man who governs by bending the truth whichever way suits him best. The result is a thrilling, despairing, yet ultimately still inspiring portrait of people who aren’t that dissimilar to Sisyphus; like that mythological character, cited by one of the journalists in the closing moments of the film, they keep pushing forward even when devastating setbacks make them question whether they’re making any real progress.
“It’s very easy to lose your country”
Similar to Last Air in Moscow, one the most prominent themes running through My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile is the feeling of not having done enough to stop Putin from developing a stranglehold on the country, something that I, as a citizen of the United States, find all too relatable. Because these journalists were still able to live relatively comfortable lives—still able to report on the regime and attend protests in the streets—they didn’t take enough concrete action to stop the inevitable backslide into facism. Now it’s too late, and their only choices are acquiescing to the regime’s demands, going to jail, or continuing to report from exile. As one of the main characters says early on in the film, “We can do more for our viewers if we can go on air from wherever we are than if we can’t go on air at all from jail.”
So, they scatter across the globe, with barely more than the shirts on their backs. TV Rain, the independent news channel that was the main focus of the first film, sets up first in Riga and later—after some on-air errors in judgment result in Latvian authorities canceling their license—in Amsterdam. Elena “Lena” Kostyuchenko, the intrepid reporter for Novaya Gazeta, is in Ukraine reporting on the war when her paper abruptly decides to stop covering the conflict; hearing rumors that Russian soldiers are waiting to kill her, she makes it to Germany, only to be poisoned by the regime from afar. Irina “Ira” Dolinina and Alesya Marokhovskaya, best friends who do investigative journalism for the outlet Independent Stories, join their boss in Prague and continue working while also receiving repeated threats that include vital information like their home addresses. They might not be within the borders of Russia anymore, but that doesn’t mean they’re entirely safe from Putin’s increasingly long grasp.
“Propaganda is like radiation—it poisons you”
My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile features most of the protagonists of Last Air in Moscow while also adding some compelling new faces. These include one of TV Rain’s youngest broadcasters, Valeria “Lera” Ratnikova, who has several powerful moments of vulnerability throughout the film, including when she summons all of her strength and professionalism to report on the killing of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Lera and the other TV Rain personnel are shown hearing the news confirmed and, the tears streaming down their faces, continuing to work while simultaneously mourning the loss of someone who they thought would eventually enable them to return home. As Lera puts it, she’s “a Navalny baby” who grew up with his work; he was always there as a symbol of hope for her, and now that hope is gone. When Lera is then charged with spreading “fake news” and sentenced to prison in absentia, her hope of ever being able to return to Russia dwindles even further. Yet it doesn’t stop her from continuing to report the truth. After all, what else does she have left?
The film also shines a light on a pair of married journalists, Russian Peter “Petya” Ruzavin and Ukrainian Nataliya “Natalka” Gumenyuk. As Petya puts it, the invasion of Ukraine has deprived him of both his first homeland and his chosen homeland, leaving him feeling both helpless and stateless. When he gets too frustrated over not being able to do enough for Ukraine as a journalist, he enlists in the Ukrainian army and heads to the front lines. Meanwhile, Natalka continues reporting from Ukraine for a variety of outlets around the world; her perspective on the war is incredibly valuable, and the only Ukrainian one amidst a sea of Russian dissidents in the film.
Petya and Natalka’s marriage is shown as a true partnership, one that thrives on good-natured ribbing and lots of laughter even in the darkest times. Perhaps they manage to maintain their positivity because they are the only characters in My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile with a strong sense of place; Ukraine is their home, even when under siege. The others find themselves incapable of assimilating into the various cities they find themselves in; if they do, that means accepting that this is their home now, and Russia is gone to them forever.
My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile has more conventional moments of drama than the first film, which devoted most of its hefty screen time to watching the characters do their day-to-day jobs and talk about the evolving situation in their apartments. If Last Air in Moscow felt like one long arc of tension slowly building, this film feels like several simultaneously: from TV Rain’s struggle to maintain their license, to Ksenia “Ksyusha” Mironova’s brief, high-risk return to Russia for her fiance’s sentencing on bogus charges of treason, to Petya’s first combat mission in the Ukrainian army. In fact, there’s so much going on that some characters don’t even appear in all of the film’s five chapters, which can be a bit challenging when they show up again and you have to recall what they were up to last. (Fortunately, Loktev understands this, and inserts enough title cards to keep you grounded in time and place without going overboard.) Still, more drama and more characters means that despite its epic length, My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile is never less than totally fascinating. It also helps that, because it was shot by Loktev herself on her iPhone, it still feels remarkably intimate despite its expanded scope; the characters address her by name and treat her with a warm familiarity that trickles down to affect the viewer.
Conclusion
There’s a moment towards the end of My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile when Ksyusha ends up in the United States reporting from Trump’s second inauguration. As she interviews voters about their reasons for voting MAGA—joking that she’s a honey trap for MAGA because she’s a tall blonde with blue eyes—she mentions that when she was younger, she saw the United States as an example of the kind of democracy that she hoped Russia would someday become. Instead, the country is resembling Russia more and more each day.
When I reviewed Last Air in Moscow in April, the situation was bad enough with CBS News rapidly transforming into unofficial state media; now we’re on the verge of those same friends of Trump merging two of the largest and most historic film studios in the country, making them able to control what stories they decide worthy of telling on screen and who is hired to tell them. Needless to say, it’s all the more important to see films like My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile while we still can, and to support the journalists doing similarly brave work in this country.
My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile opens at Film Forum in New York on October 9, 2026.
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