My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow

The film is immersive, in the sense of the frog in gradually heating water, where you reach boiling point before you realize it.

Loktev’s accomplishment in this extraordinarily human cinematic document is to simply keep filming—to cling fast to her camera, and to keep it focussed on the remarkable sight of young people showing exemplary courage. In doing so, she keeps faith with the words of another speaker, pledging solidarity with dissidents everywhere: “Evil is not eternal, and truth will surely win.”

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.

What’s surprising about the film is how hopeful it is, zeroing in on human creativity and resilience during the worst of times rather than wallowing in abject misery.

It’s one of the best films of the year, full stop. But now it’s both invaluable and something of a warning for many of us on the shape of things to come.

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.