The Close-up

On the first episode of our daily 62nd New York Film Festival edition of the FLC podcast, director Julia Loktev and subjects Anna Nemzer, Ksenia Mironova, and Olga Churakova join Rachel Rosen to discuss My Undesirable Friends Part I – Last Air in Moscow, world premiering in the Main Slate of this year's festival. American filmmaker Julia Loktev (The Loneliest Planet, NYFF49), born in the Soviet Union, returned to Moscow in 2021 to make a documentary on the persistence of independent journalism in Putin’s Russia—just months, as it turned out, before the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. With her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk show journalist for TV Rain, Russia’s last remaining independent news channel, Loktev ends up immersing herself with a group of young women fighting to ensure the vocalization of dissent and outspoken criticism of the country—even as they are branded by the government as “foreign agents,” their careers and lives increasingly at risk as the country creeps toward war. Structured in fiv