Review: 'My Undesirable Friends' puts us front row as a real-life Russian TV channel unravels

Great documentaries are sometimes lucky accidents, the product of being at the right place at the right time and then having the wherewithal to produce something extraordinary out of those unlikely circumstances.When director Julia Loktev traveled to Russia in October 2021, all she wanted was to chronicle a handful of smart, dogged journalists trying to tell the truth who, for their trouble, had been branded foreign agents by Vladimir Putin’s vindictive government.

She didn’t know she would be arriving mere months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.But thanks to a quirk of coincidence, she ended up having a front-row seat to history.She made the most of it: Running five-and-a-half hours without a minute wasted, “My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow” takes us inside TV Rain, one of Russia’s last independent television channels.

Divided into five chapters, the documentary begins as Loktev, who was born in the former Soviet Union before leaving when she was 9, returns to her homeland armed with an iPhone to shadow veteran TV Rain reporter and host Anna Nemzer.Over the next four months, a period that ended shortly after the invasion began, Loktev embedded herself not just with Nemzer (who is credited as the film’s co-director) but several other journalists as they fear being arrested for their reporting.Loktev hasn’t completed a film since 2011’s “The Loneliest Planet,” which starred Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg as soon-to-be-wed lovers backpacking through the Georgian countryside, their seemingly close bond shattered after a harrowing encounter.

In that movie and her previous feature, 2006’s “Day Night Day Night,” a spare procedural about a nameless suicide bomber in New York, Loktev explored the mysteries of human behavior under pressure.But with “My Undesirable Friends,” she takes that fascination to a new level, introducing viewers to a group of compelling subjects, many of them women in th...