An 11-Hour Masterpiece Is Finally Complete. It’s Riveting From Start to Finish.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

At one point in My Undesirable Friends: Part II—Exile , Julia Loktev’s nearly six-hour documentary about Russian journalists struggling to cover their country’s descent into full-bore authoritarianism, the fate of Russian’s only independent news broadcaster hinges on the use of a pronoun. It’s a few hours into this part of the story, following the five gripping and unsettling hours of Part I—Last Air in Moscow , and the remnants of the once-bustling network TV Rain have been reconstituted in Latvia, where thousands of Russians fled after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Their army’s brutality has made Russians, even those who opposed Putin’s regime, a controversial presence in European countries, and although the Latvian government has granted Rain the right to broadcast from within its borders, officials seem to be looking for a way to walk back an unpopular decision. So they seize on a single phrase: “our soldiers.” The argument is absurd, suggesting that because Rain is broadcasting from Latvia, viewers might believe the term, spoken in Russian by a Russian, refers to the Latvian army, and not to Russian troops. But the charge sticks, and the movie’s subjects find themselves, once again, looking for a place they can even temporarily call home.

As it happens, “our soldiers” was used in the course of reporting that Russian troops were committing war crimes in Ukraine—a way of accepting responsibility for their actions, despite the fact that TV Rain’s journalists opposed the invasion right up to the point where it became unsafe to do so within Russia’s borders. Part I ends with most of Loktev’s subjects packing up and leaving within a matter of hours as it becomes clear that the moment they’d hoped would never come was unavoidably upon them. Even as they reported each day on the steady march of Putin’s tyranny, they lived what remained of their lives as best they could, gathering in one another’s apartments and swapping references to Gossip Girl and Harry Potter . Part II begins almost immediately thereafter, as those journalists flee with hastily packed suitcases and scatter around the world, watching from afar as the country they love disintegrates. But even as they leave their old lives behind, some are still haunted by the idea that they didn’t do enough to stop it. “Of course, we are guilty,” says the TV Rain anchor Anna Nemzer, who at that point in the film has resettled in Tel Aviv with her husband and daughter. (She is also credited as the film’s co-director.) “Of course, we failed and let this happen.”

It’s fair to say that Loktev, who was born in the Soviet Union and raised in Colorado, doesn’t share that dim view of her subjects’ efforts. They are, as the title indicates, her friends, and after a while, they start to feel like ours, too. Perhaps they did fail at the impossible task of stopping the war, or of dethroning Putin, in the way that people whose only power is to speak the truth often do.