‘My Undesirable Friends’ And Upcoming Sequel Acquired By MUBI.

EXCLUSIVE: MUBI is going all in on Julia Loktev’s acclaimed nonfiction epic My Undesirable Friends.

The global distributor, streaming service and production company announced it is acquiring both part one of Loktev’s film, titled My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, as well as its upcoming sequel: My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile. The films are set to debut exclusively on MUBI this year.

Part I of Loktev’s opus premiered at the 2024 New York Film Festival and earned a place on this year’s Oscar shortlist for Best Documentary Feature. It also won Best Documentary Feature at the Gotham Awards, and top documentary honors from the National Society of Film Critics, the New York Film Critics Circle, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. It’s nominated for Best Documentary Feature at next month’s Film Independent Spirit Awards.

Loktev was born in Russia and immigrated to the U.S. at age 9. She returned to Moscow to work on a documentary project about the last few remaining independent new organizations in Russia, little realizing events would soon imperil the women at the heart of her film.

“In My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, what begins as an intimate portrait of Russian independent journalists facing persecution by Putin’s regime takes a drastic turn when Russia starts a full-scale war in Ukraine and the journalists are all forced into exile,” notes a release. “The film offers a front row seat to how authoritarianism impacts the lives of those who resist, which becomes all the more globally relevant every day.”

The release continues, “The documentary follows Alesya Marokhovskaya, Anna Nemzer, Elena Kostyuchenko, Irina Dolinina, Ksenia Mironova, Olga Churakova and Sonya Groysman. My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile picks up with the characters immediately after they leave Russia, and follows them from country to country, as they struggle with shame and accountability for a war they all oppose.”

Loktev’s directing credits including fiction and nonfiction films. The Loneliest Planet, a 2011 drama starring Gael García Bernal, earned the Grand Jury Prize at the AFI Film Festival. Her 2006 crime thriller Day Night Day Night premiered at Cannes in Directors Fortnight. Loktev’s documentary Moment of Impact (1998) won the Sundance Film Festival Documentary Directing Award and the Grand Prize at Cinéma du Reél.

My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow runs an impressive 5 hours, 24 minutes.

“When I started making My Undesirable Friends, I had no idea I would be capturing history,” Loktev said in a statement. “I also never imagined the story would become so urgent and so relatable for so many now. It’s a film about a country sliding into authoritarianism, and about those who resist, and speaking as an American, every day it hits closer to home. I’ve seen critics describe it as a thriller, a disaster film, a hangout film, a love story, and I think they’re all right. For months, as word about My Undesirable Friends has spread, people from all over the world have been asking me, ‘Where can I see it?’ I’m so incredibly excited the film has found a home with Mubi and that audiences internationally will be able to watch it soon.”

The title My Undesirable Friends refers to an official designation in Russia: the Kremlin slaps the term “undesirable organization” on any group that it disfavors, including independent news media stations like Rain TV, as well as human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch Moscow, the International Federation for Human Rights, and hundreds of other organizations.

“’Undesirable organization’ is actually a legal classification in Russia,” Loktev told Deadline in a recent interview. “Russia has now deemed almost all independent media as undesirable organizations along with many, many civil rights organizations, NGOs, educational institutions; things like Greenpeace have been declared undesirable organizations, a few universities like Bard College [in the U.S.], Yale… The list of undesirable organizations grows every day, as does the list of ‘extremists’ and ‘terrorists.’ Russia has basically declared independent media to be undesirable, journalism to be undesirable.”

Asked why Russia’s president would move aggressively against so many institutions, Loktev told Deadline, “Putin is afraid of people knowing the truth. Putin is afraid of people speaking the truth about the war. Putin is afraid of opposition. Putin is afraid of anything that is not propaganda.”