My Undesirable Friends: Part II—Exile, Julia Loktev’s follow-up to 2024’s My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow, runs just under six hours—a length many will find prohibitively daunting.
Yet such length is central to this gripping and heartbreaking documentary, conveying the excruciating arduousness of its subjects’ persecution and the rootlessness, loneliness, and fear it begets. Continuing the intertwined stories of several young, independent female Russian reporters as they attempt to survive (and maintain their careers) after fleeing their native country in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine, it’s an in-depth portrait of courageous journalism under fire, tyrannical fascism on the warpath, and the human lives caught in the crossfire.
Beginning two days after its predecessor concluded in March 2022, Exile—executive-produced by Meryl Streep and Laura Poitras, and screening at the New York Film Festival before arriving in theaters on Oct. 9—once again charts the travails of numerous reporters forced to high-tail it out of their homeland for safer pastures.
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