Hottest Documentary Going Into Oscar Shortlist Voting? Arguably, It's Mammoth 'My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air In Moscow'

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Julia Loktev's documentary My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow enters Oscar shortlist voting with incredible momentum. On Sunday, the film was named Best Documentary/Nonfiction film by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, just days after it won Best Documentary Film at the Gotham Awards and Best Non-Fiction Film at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, and earned a nomination for the Film Independent Spirit Awards.

Loktev, who was born in the then-Soviet Union and immigrated to the U.S. at age 9, returned to Moscow in 2021 to make her film, which runs 5 hours and 24 minutes and is told in chapters. It was a fateful time to embark on a documentary about journalists dedicated to independent reporting in Putin's Russia; within a few months of Loktev's arrival, Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine and anyone who failed to toe the Kremlin line would soon find themselves a target of repression.

In fact, those who deviated from parroting Russian propaganda were branded "undesirable" (hence the film's title).

"'Undesirable organization' is actually a legal classification in Russia," Loktev tells Deadline. "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, 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."

The filmmaker's "undesirable friends" include Anna Nemzer, talk show host at Russia's last independent news channel, TV Rain; Ksenia Mironova, a reporter at TV Rain, and Elena Kostyuchenko, a journalist at Novaya Gazeta who has been compared t