At Venice, the most unsettling spectacle has not come from a red carpet or a studio blockbuster. It has come from reporters who keep working after their own country becomes unreachable. Screening out of competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile quickly emerged as one of the festival’s first major critical events. Across 355 minutes, nearly six hours, it follows independent Russian journalists rebuilding their work, relationships and daily lives away from Moscow.
The film begins where Part I – Last Air in Moscow ended. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, several subjects connected to outlets including TV Rain understand that staying could mean prison, while leaving offers no guarantee of safety or stability. Loktev does not reduce their journey to a political thesis. She records the long duration of exile: paperwork, separation, professional uncertainty and one persistent question—how do journalists continue speaking to a country that has forced them out?
A documentary that changes the scale of Venice
The running time is formidable, but it is central to the project. According to the Venice Biennale’s official presentation, Loktev wanted to capture in real time a historic exile that remains ongoing and open-ended. Divided into five chapters, the film accompanies its reporters across several years. Audiences do not merely receive a sequence of headlines. They experience visa delays, relocated newsrooms, family calls, fatigue and the repeated labor required to protect a space for independent speech.
This scale makes the work feel like a chronicle rather than a conventional report. Screen Daily argues that the second chapter deepens the portrait by becoming more intimate, while RogerEbert.com describes it as an essential continuation of a record of human resilience. Major events—war, repression, the death of Alexei Navalny and political hardening—move through screens and conversations, but they remain connected to their consequences in ordinary lives.
Reporting when going home is impossible
The protagonists do not stop being journalists when they cross a border. Yet nearly everything that made their reporting possible must be rebuilt. Sources inside Russia may face danger, relatives live with distance and teams scatter according to visas and residence permits. Their language remains Russian and their intended audience is often still in Russia, but studios, homes and reference points keep moving. Exile becomes a fragile infrastructure as well as an intimate wound.
The title points toward the legal and administrative mechanisms used to isolate critical voices, including designations such as “foreign agent” and “undesirable organization.” Loktev shows what bureaucratic labels do to real lives. A designation can erase a salary, a home or the possibility of return. It can also turn every publication into an act of resistance. The issue extends beyond Russia: wherever power tries to make journalism materially impossible, the struggle over information begins with the survival of the people producing it.
Why Venice is the decisive stage
The 2026 festival has placed journalism and geopolitics at the center of several films. The Associated Press identified Loktev’s documentary as a major title in a program that also includes work about Gaza and Elon Musk. By screening Exile out of competition, Venice gives it a global platform beyond specialist documentary audiences. The selection arrives as festivals decide whether they exist only to celebrate stars or can also become sites of immediate historical memory.
The contrast is striking. Only steps away from photographers and luxury brands, a film lasting nearly six hours asks viewers to slow down and watch suspended lives. That gesture resists the rapid consumption of news but suits cinema perfectly. Duration makes visible the erosion that phone alerts erase. It also separates the abstract category of “the exile” from a person who works, loves, jokes, doubts and searches for a new definition of home.
A political film without simplified heroes
Loktev’s strength is her refusal to create flawless heroes. Her reporters can be brave and exhausted, resolute and disoriented. They cover a war waged by their country while confronting guilt attached to nationality. From cities where they may not know how long they can remain, they observe decisions made in Moscow and their devastating consequences. That contradiction gives the film its sharpest moral tension.
The first installment documented the last months when dissenting journalism was still possible from inside Russia. The second records what spectacular escape footage usually leaves out: permanent displacement. Together, the films reveal a historical transformation without an all-knowing narrator. Apartments, improvised offices and conversations become the archive of a press corps that has been displaced but not erased.
The signal the film world cannot ignore
For the industry, the announced journey through Venice, Telluride and New York before a theatrical rollout shows that a demanding documentary can still circulate as a cultural event. Its length creates a commercial challenge, but also makes a promise: this is an experience unlike a news feed or a series engineered merely to retain attention. In a market crowded with disposable content, such formal commitment may become an advantage.
For audiences in France and across Europe, the film poses a nearby question. Welcoming journalists in exile requires more than temporary refuge. It means protecting newsrooms, skills and the ability to reach audiences exposed to propaganda. Displaced independent media need financing, legal safeguards and durable partnerships. Without those networks, exile could achieve what censorship set out to do: break the connection between reporters and readers.
My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile offers no easy victory. It shows instead that press freedom is made from repeated actions: switching on a camera, checking a fact, calling a source, finding a studio and beginning again somewhere else. By giving six hours to those actions, Julia Loktev turns displaced lives into collective memory. Venice provides the film with its first great international stage; its real impact will depend on whether audiences choose to watch, understand and refuse to look away.
