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Ksenia Mironova is one of the journalists portrayed in My Unwanted Friends: Part I
In Russia, especially since the invasion of Ukraine, as in the United States today, journalists are persecuted and arrested, comedy shows are suspended or ended, and cultural institutions are “advised” to talk about “only the pleasant things in history”.
In the fall of 2021, four months before Russia unleashed a full-scale war in Ukraine, filmmaker Julia Loktev traveled to Moscow to make a documentary.
The Kremlin had at the time just labeled more than 100 individuals and organizations like “foreign agents“, an expression with deep roots in Soviet-era repression, and Loktev wanted to understand what this classification meant.
“It is quite disturbing when a society forces its members… to identify themselves everywhere as suspects, as not truly belonging to the society,” says Loktev. “And we said: OK, let’s try to make a movie about this. Let’s see where this takes us“.
Loktev, a US citizen born in the Soviet Union, says the classification was being applied to reporters, bloggers and human rights groups who had spent decades documenting political persecution.
Your documentary, My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscowfollows a group of young journalists who work for the TV RainRussia’s last independent television channel, as well as other independent journalists who had been considered foreign agents.
Loktev affirms que the nature of your film changed on February 24, 2022when Russia invaded Ukraine.
“In that first week of the full-scale war, all that independent journalism becomes impossible in Russia“, he says. “And all these characters try to work to live another dayto simply continue reporting the truth.”
Many of the documentary’s protagonists ended up fleeing Russia. A TV Rain now operates from the Netherlandsand Loktev notes that the Russian government has accused several of the station’s news presenters of being extremist terrorists.
That’s all parallels between the protagonists of your film and Sisyphusthe character from Greek mythology condemned to constantly pushing a rock up a hill.
“If there’s a lesson, I think it’s the things people say in the film, like: ‘May joy and laughter be part of our resistance,’” explains the filmmaker. “He knows, find meaning in pushing the stone and not giving up — even when things seem pretty hopeless.”
Loktev also finds parallels between Russia’s repression to journalists and the current political climate in the USA, which become more and more relevant with each passing day, be it the arrests of journalists, obviously, or the end of comedy programs.
In the documentary, there is a passage in which the MemorialRussia’s oldest and largest NGO, human rights organization dedicated to preserving memory and investigating cases of political repression that date back to Stalinist times, but also current cases, it is closed by the courts.
The judge uses the following justification: why are we, the victors of the Second World War, “We should be ashamed of our history“?
“And then I hear Trump talk about the Smithsonian and saying: Why can’t we talk only about the pleasant things in our history? Why do we have to talk about things like slavery? Every day it seems like something in the film starts to resonate here in the USA”, says the filmmaker.
