Watch ‘My Undesirable Friends’ Director Julia Loktev Recall the Week Russia Invaded Ukraine

Great documentaries never turn out quite the way you plan them. You might start out thinking that you’re making one film, but a documentarian has to be willing to accept when changes in the lives of their subjects changes the nature of their project.

Julia Loktev‘s two-part documentary “My Undesirable Friends” is a perfect example of this. The films, which follow journalists at TV Rain, which was Russia’s last independent news channel before it was shut down over coverage of the war in Ukraine, began as a story about journalists working in a hostile climate. But when her subjects were forced to flee the country and scatter across Europe, “My Undesirable Friends” had to expand its scale.

During a conversation with IndieWire’s Chris O’Falt at our Art of the Doc event, Loktev opened up about the project’s origins. While she had already been shooting footage of her subjects, the films truly took shape the week Russia invaded Ukraine.

“Neither of these two films were supposed to happen,” Loktev said. “I just started making a film that I thought was gonna be called ‘The Lives of Foreign Agents’ about these young journalists that were being called foreign agents. And the media were being called undesirable organizations. Of course, what we didn’t know was that four and a half months later, Russia would start a full scale war with Ukraine and shut down all independent media within that first week.”

“‘Part II’ starts right after all these journalists were forced to leave the country,” she continued. “Putin calls them the flies that Russia spits out of its mouth. But that first week was terrifying. Nobody could imagine invading Ukraine. The war had been going for eight years, but it was the kind of year where the world allowed Russia to host a world cup… All of these journalists tried to report the truth to Russians, and up until that moment they were living in Russia. Maybe you were waiting for the police to show up at your office or your home, maybe friends of yours were being arrested, but you could still work in Russia. And then that stopped.”

Watch the complete conversation with Loktev in the video above.

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