Loktev’s Exile Sequel Follows Journalists Who Cannot Go Home

Julia Loktev has released the first trailer for My Undesirable Friends: Part II, Exile, a 355-minute documentary heading to the New York Film Festival on September 27. The film already played Venice on September 4 and Telluride on September 6. It opens October 9 at Film Forum in New York, with Loktev and several of its subjects booked for a post-screening Q and A at the festival.

The trailer is the easy news. The harder fact is what the camera has been doing since March 2022: following the same independent Russian reporters as they rebuilt a newsroom that no longer has a country attached to it.

Five Chapters Track Four Years of Displacement

Loktev splits the new film into five chapters and 355 minutes, or 5 hours 55 minutes, the same serial shape she used on Part I. Venice screened chapters 1 to 3 at 191 minutes, took a 15-minute intermission, then ran chapters 4 and 5 at 164 minutes. Film at Lincoln Center lists the New York premiere at 11:45 a.m. on September 27, with a Q and A, inside the 64th New York Film Festival, which runs September 25 through October 12.

Loktev directed, shot, produced, and co-edited the picture, and recorded sound. Anna Nemzer, a TV Rain host and one of the people on camera, is credited as co-director. Michael Taylor shares editing credit. Sami Buccella wrote the music. Marminchilla produced. Cinetic is handling sales. Loktev is self-distributing the theatrical run. MUBI, which began streaming Part I worldwide except in Russia and Belarus on April 3, 2026, holds streaming rights to both halves.

She has said the new film covers four and a half years, against four and a half months in the first. The geography is the point. After independent media in Moscow was shut in the first week of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the reporters left in hours, some with a carry-on, and kept moving. Loktev has put the chase at 13 countries. The record on screen includes Istanbul, Tbilisi, Prague, Vienna, Amsterdam, New York, Warsaw, Hamburg, Israel, Latvia, and Washington, D.C.

She shot on an iPhone with a clip-on lens, the same close, handheld method that got her through Moscow without a crew the state could clock. When she left, she dumped footage to the cloud on hotel Wi-Fi in case a drive was taken at the border. The sequel starts a few days after that exit, with people who still thought they were between assignments.

The Journalists Keep Working Under New Charges

The cast is a working press corps, mostly women, from TV Rain, the investigative outlet iStories, and Novaya Gazeta. They are not retired subjects. They are still filing on Russia and the war, while courts at home write prison terms onto empty chairs.

WHERE THE CAMERA GOES AFTER MOSCOW

Sonya Groysman and Yana Kuchina are in the Venice credits as well. A Venice photocall on September 5 put Groysman, Nemzer, Ruzavin, Loktev, Kostyuchenko, Kuchina, and Ratnikova in the same frame, which is about as close as this group now gets to a newsroom photo.

Ratnikova is the one who says, in a taxi in Istanbul at 23, “It’s like my life is totally in someone else’s hands.” Russian courts later made that literal. On October 2, 2025, she was detained in absentia, with TV Rain deputy editor Ekaterina Kotrikadze, on charges of “fakes” about the army and of breaking the foreign agent rules. Both were living in the Netherlands. She had already been listed as wanted, and on October 7, 2025, she was added to Rosfinmonitoring’s list of terrorists and extremists.

Mironova is the exception who went back. She re-entered Russia to attend the sentencing of her fiancé, Ivan Safronov, who drew 22 years in a penal colony on treason charges in 2022. Kostyuchenko quits Novaya Gazeta on camera because the only way to file honestly from Ukraine is to leave the paper. She later learns she is on a checkpoint kill list. Nemzer spends ten months in Tbilisi before she lands in New York with her daughter, then 14.

What a Foreign Agent Label Requires

A foreign agent designation is a paperwork trap with criminal teeth. Every article and social post must carry a disclaimer. Monthly reports go to the ministry. Miss the ritual often enough and the file becomes a case, then a warrant, then a sentence that waits at the border.

Nemzer, who walked Loktev into TV Rain in 2021, has described the rule in plain sequence. Fail the stamp and you get a fine, then another fine, then a criminal charge, then jail. The disclaimer she had to paste was 24 words, on everything, including a tweet.

Every material you produce, whether it is an article, or it is a post on social media, you have to put this paragraph of 24 words, basically explaining that this post, or this article, is created by a foreign agent. And you can’t not do that, because otherwise there would be a fee, and, like, one fee, then two fees, and then that would be a criminal charge. So, basically, you could end up in jail.

Anna Nemzer, TV Rain host and co-director, at a press conference

The Committee to Protect Journalists, in a log updated February 17, 2026, has been counting what that system produced after February 24, 2022. The figures sit beside the film, not inside it, and they explain why a sequel shot in rented flats still feels like a crime story.

WHAT CPJ HAS COUNTED SINCE THE INVASION

• In prison: 27 journalists held on criminal charges, 15 of them Russian, 10 Ukrainian, and 2 American.
• Sentenced abroad: 27 exiled journalists sentenced in absentia.
• Foreign agents: 355 journalists and media outlets branded with the label, a headcount that happens to match the sequel’s minute count and is a different fact.
• Undesirable outlets: 27 news organizations banned under that separate stamp, with 14 journalists placed on the financial-intelligence list of terrorists and extremists, and more than 25,000 sites blocked over war reporting.

Reporters Without Borders, working with the Justice for Journalists Foundation, has treated the in absentia cases against journalists in exile as a method, not a backlog. Jeanne Cavelier, who heads the group’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk, called those judgments “the Kremlin’s political weapon to hunt journalists in exile,” used to criminalize return and lean on families. An in-absentia file can freeze banking, stop a passport renewal at an embassy, and put relatives’ phones through a border search. Average prison terms in the cases RSF reviewed ran about eight years.

Part I Already Ran 324 Minutes

This is not a new beat for Loktev. The five-chapter 324-minute first film, Last Air in Moscow, premiered in the Main Slate of the 62nd New York Film Festival on October 13, 2024. Film at Lincoln Center screened it in two blocks, chapters 1 to 3 at 198 minutes and chapters 4 and 5 at 124 minutes. The international premiere followed at Berlinale on February 20, 2025. U.S. theaters took it on August 15, 2025.

It won Best Documentary Feature at the Gotham Awards and the top nonfiction prizes from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the National Society of Film Critics. It made the shortlist for Best Documentary Feature at the 98th Academy Awards and did not get a nomination. MUBI posted the official trailer for the first film when the streamer launched it on April 3, 2026.

Loktev, born in the Soviet Union and taken to the United States at age 9, went back to Moscow in fall 2021 to film friends who had been marked as foreign agents. She has said she had no idea she would be capturing history. Four months later the invasion started, TV Rain was blocked on March 1, 2022, and Natalya Sindeyeva announced the channel’s closure on March 3. Most of the people in the film were out within a week. Combined, the two parts run 679 minutes, or 11 hours 19 minutes, which is why festival print still talks about them as one piece of work split by a border.

FROM MOSCOW TO FILM FORUM

1. Fall 2021: Loktev begins filming Nemzer and colleagues in Moscow after foreign agent listings spread through independent media.
2. February 24, 2022: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine begins; the last independent newsrooms try to report it from inside the country.
3. March 1 to 3, 2022: TV Rain is blocked and then closed; the journalists flee, many through Istanbul.
4. October 13, 2024: Part I premieres at the New York Film Festival at 324 minutes.
5. December 2025: Part I sweeps the major U.S. critics’ documentary prizes and later lands on the Oscar shortlist.
6. April 3, 2026: MUBI begins streaming Part I, excluding Russia and Belarus.
7. September 4 to 6, 2026: Part II premieres in Venice, then plays Telluride.
8. September 14, 2026: The first Part II trailer is released; Film Forum sets an October 9 opening.

The first film ended on a cliff, with people still in motion. The second one had already been shooting for years by the time Part I reached Lincoln Center, which is why “sequel” is a clumsy word for it. It is the same shoot, continued until the lives on camera stopped looking temporary.

TV Rain’s Latvia Restart Collapses on a Phrase

Exile did not pause the work. It changed the mistakes that could kill a channel. TV Rain tried to stand up again in Latvia. The license went soon after, over the on-air phrase “our army,” a slip that read as too close to Moscow for a host country already nervous about Russian-language television. The film treats that collapse as a fact of the new job: you can lose a frequency for a pronoun.

Guilt sits on the same track. The reporters know they are safer than people under fire in Ukraine, and they say so. Kostyuchenko’s path, off the paper and into occupied territory, is the sharpest version of that argument. Ruzavin and Gumenyuk, a Russian former TV Rain journalist and a Ukrainian editor, share a household that the film uses to show how the war rearranged private life as well as beats.

A late passage puts Mironova in Washington, D.C., interviewing Trump supporters on the day of his second inauguration. The cut is not a cameo. It is the film admitting that the story they fled now has an American chapter, and that the same reporter who once waited at a Moscow police station is working a U.S. sidewalk because that is where the next question is. Loktev has compared the early foreign agent stamps to 1935 in Germany, when people were first forced to mark themselves, and asked how far a person can bend and still work. Part II is the answer after bending failed.

Streep and Poitras Join as Executive Producers

Meryl Streep and Laura Poitras joined as executive producers in an announcement dated September 2, 2026, two days before Venice. Streep had already hosted a Part I screening in January and, by her own account, meant to watch 45 minutes and stayed for the full running time. Her statement on the sequel is the one line the trailer will have to live under.

Julia Loktev is the Samuel Pepys of Putin’s Russia. In this second installment, she follows a group of young Russian journalists who had to flee for their lives in one night. As they scrabble to land somewhere, anywhere, with just the clothes on their backs, they somehow continue to deliver the truth to their countrymen. These beautiful, intrepid, witty and irrepressible young women and men are living witnesses to the destruction of the last vestiges of the dream of freedom of expression in Russia. It’s an intimate, compelling journey; the journalists themselves giving us access to their determination, and their despair, in turns. I felt at the end of the film as if they were members of my family, so generously do they share their loving selves. The film is a blazing achievement.

Meryl Streep, executive producer, in a statement

Poitras said she was honored to stand “alongside Julia and her many extraordinarily courageous and desirable friends.” Loktev called the pairing an act of solidarity from two people whose work, she said, is dedicated to telling the deepest truths. The prestige is real and it does not commute a sentence. A festival laureate can still be unbankable in the country she is describing, and a wanted list does not pause for a photocall.

Film Forum Opens the Picture on October 9

New York is not treating the 355-minute running time as a problem to hide. Film at Lincoln Center put the film in the Main Slate, the same berth Part I had, and scheduled it with a Q and A on September 27. Festival tickets went on sale at noon Eastern on September 15. After that date the picture moves to a single theater: Film Forum, beginning October 9. The BFI London Film Festival follows on October 14.

Film Forum’s own account, posting on September 14 with the new trailer, said the film “opens October 9 only at Film Forum.” That is a theatrical bet, not a courtesy booking. People already sat through 324 minutes of Part I in this city. The new invitation is to sit through the years that came after, in one house, without pretending the story resolved when the planes left Sheremetyevo.

Julia Loktev's MY UNDESIRABLE FRIENDS: PART II – EXILE opens October 9 only at Film Forum. Watch the new trailer below now! https://t.co/7PsNf6GsAA

— Film Forum (@FilmForumNYC) September 14, 2026

MUBI will take the sequel online after the theatrical window. Until then the journalists on screen remain in the condition the last chapter leaves them: working, displaced, and still a court date away from home. The credits can roll. The warrants do not.