In one particularly sobering scene, a reporter laments, “For 20 years, a monster was growing in front of our eyes whom we all fed with our silence and our passivity.” Loktev, who was born in Russia and raised in the U.S., is worried by how familiar the story she captured seems to developments back home under Donald Trump’s second presidential administration. “My Undesirable Friends,” which released Friday on Mubi more than a year after its September 2024 premiere at New York Film Festival, marks the first film from Loktev since her 2011 feature “The Loneliest Planet.” The film, shortlisted for the 2026 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, clocks in at nearly five and a half hours — and is only the first half of Loktev’s planned “My Undesirable Friends” duology. I mean, look, when I started making this film, it was a film very much about Russia, which was very much a faraway place, so it felt like, ‘Oh, here’s all these kind of strange things happening to nice people in a faraway country that has nothing to do with us here,’” she said.
Author: Casey Loving
Published at: 2026-04-04 20:25:58
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