Meryl Streep and Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras (Citzenfour) have come onboard as executive producers on upcoming documentary My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile, Julia Loktev’s follow up to her acclaimed 2024 doc My Undesirable Friends: Part I – The Last Air in Moscow about independent journalists under fire in Russia.
In her new documentary, which will have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Loktev follows a group of young journalists labelled “foreign agents” by Putin’s regime. When Putin shuts down all independent media in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the reporters have to flee Moscow on a moment’s notice. Loktev follows them in exile, across a dozen countries over four years across a dozen countries as they continue to try and report the truth about their country’s war crimes, while being declared terrorists by their country’s government and facing death threats.
“Julia Loktev is the Samuel Pepys of Putin’s Russia – Alone and armed only with her cell phone camera she chronicled the dismemberment of the free press in Moscow in her first film,” said Streep in a statement. “In this second installment, she follows a group of young Russian journalists who had to flee for their lives in one night. As they scrabble to land somewhere, anywhere, with just the clothes on their backs, they somehow continue to deliver the truth to their countrymen. These beautiful, intrepid, witty and irrepressible young women and men are living witnesses to the destruction of the last vestiges of the dream of freedom of expression in Russia. It’s an intimate, compelling journey; the journalists themselves giving us access to their determination, and their despair, in turns. I felt at the end of the film as if they were members of my family, so generously do they share their loving selves. The film is a blazing achievement.”
