Following her mammoth five-hour odyssey “My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow,” Julia Loktev’s sequel remains just as riveting, if not more so, in its continued depiction of journalists escaping the Russian government. Its predecessor’s endpoint (one Loktev could not have foreseen when she began shooting on her iPhone X) was the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and the overnight escape of her close friends from Moscow after they were branded foreign agents for reporting on war crimes. “My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile” follows their stories amidst this exodus, a globetrotting journey that proves harrowing in unexpected ways over an engrossing five chapters, spanning 355 minutes.
That figure might seem imposing to the uninitiated, but Loktev and co-editor Michael Taylor have, once again, crafted a conversational epic that imbues each twist and turn with enormous stakes. It’s hard not to get invested in the lives of Part I’s subjects and Part II’s newcomers alike. Speaking truth to power with the online tools at their disposal, this murderer’s row consists of lively, awkward, driven, beautiful, lovestruck and above-all complicated people, all caught in impossible personal and professional deadlocks and weighed down by immigrant uncertainty.
