We’re on a street in a cosmopolitan city, cars whizzing by. A woman’s voice calmly addresses us. “The world you are about to see no longer exists,” she says. “None of us knew what was about to happen.”
That is Julia Loktev’s voice. It’s October 2021, and she has arrived in Moscow to make a film about two young Russian journalists, Sonya Groysman and Olga Churakova, after reading an article in The New York Times about their podcast “Hello, You Are a Foreign Agent.” They’ve been put on the a list of “foreign agents” by the Russian Ministry of Justice, which means they have to register every personal expenditure with the government and append a disclaimer to everything they broadcast or publish — even personal Instagram posts — or face fines, even jail time.
Their only infraction, so to speak, is not reporting the news in the manner that the Russian government would prefer.
Loktev, who was born in St. Petersburg and immigrated to the United States when she was 9, thought this might make for a good documentary. History tells us that labeling independent journalists as adversaries of their own country tends not to end there. So with the help of her friend Anna Nemzer, a journalist at the then-Moscow-based independent news station TV Rain, she befriended a number of other journalists in the city. Most were in their 20s; most were women; most worked at TV Rain. Loktev went to Moscow and started filming.
What none of them knew — what none of them could have possibly known — was that within four months, Russia would launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That has had many horrendous consequences, and one is that it provides a useful pretext for the near-total shutdown of Russian independent media; journalists could now be labeled “internal enemies” for reporting on the war in terms counter to the government’s narrative. Almost all of these journalists would flee the country, fearing prison or worse. And Loktev’s film would evolve into a shattering portrayal of an authoritarian government using misinformation, isolation and war to control its citizens.
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The post ‘My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow’ Review: Strangling Democracy appeared first on New York Times.
