My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow

“My Undesirable Friends” captures dark times with some of the funniest people you’d ever hope to have as sisters-in-arms. Defiant, emotional and life-affirming, the film presents us with endearing patriots who love their country but hate its leaders, sucking us into a riveting tale with a powerful undertow.

For all five hours, Loktev’s camera is positioned close to her subjects, much like a friend in the same room, lending the project an intimacy and empathy that it would have otherwise lacked. And the length allows us to really get to know these people, feeling their frustration and their tension. It becomes our own. We don’t just see it. We feel it in our bones.

Loktev’s film is a stunningly stressful experience in what it’s like to actually decide when the desire to stay and fight should give way to the need to cut and run.

Loktev’s immersion in the action provides a pulse-pounding quality when things come crumbling down, resulting in an intimate, enormous, urgent political portrait of speaking truth to power, and speaking it together.

Loktev seems to be everywhere at once. She risks her life with the camera as journalists do with their pens, programs, and presence, holding on as long as they can in the week after the war begins.

At times the movie feels so raw and unedited, it’s as if Loktev dumped all her footage onto the table without shaping it into a definitive cut. Perhaps a leaner two-hour version would have yielded something more dynamic, though the point of My Undesirable Friends isn’t to entertain us, but to capture every detail of a democratic movement that was doomed to fail.

The drama is all surface, in other words. And what a surface, for sure. A literal life and death struggle that’s exceedingly of this moment. Yet the best documentaries tend to have formidable underlying narratives working in concert with their overlying ones.