Episode 58: My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow (2024) (Guest: Rachel Denber and Anna Nemzer)
Files
Loading...
Description
My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow (2024) is Russian-language American documentary film written and directed by Julia Loktev (with co-director Anna Nemzer). The film describes the effort to maintain press freedoms in Putin’s Russia in the period leading up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The documentary provides an intimate portrait of independent Russian journalists—mainly young women—who risk everything to pursue truth and accountability amidst escalating repression under the Putin regime. Filmed in late 2021 and early 2022, the documentary captures how the legal machinery of censorship, surveillance, and state-harassment converged to crush internal dissent and incapacitate civil society. It not only provides a profoundly disturbing account of what has occurred in Russia but also serves as a broader warning about the fragility of press freedoms and in a time of rising authoritarianism worldwide.
Guests: Rachel Denber
Rachel Denber is an expert on human rights in the Central Eurasia region. Until recently, she was deputy director for Human Rights Watch's Europe and Central Asia division, where she oversaw research and advocacy on the region's countries researched and published reports about numerous human rights issues.
Guest: Anna Nemzer
Anna Nemzer is a Russian-born journalist, writer and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on the historical memory of wars in the post-Soviet space. She has served as a presenter on the independent Russian television channel TV Rain (also known as Dozhd), now operating in exile. In addition, she is a scholar at Bard College in the United States and is co-founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive (RIMA), a project dedicated to preserving independent Russian media as a historical record. Nemzer also appears prominently in the documentary My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow (2024), where she features as a talk-show host at TV Rain and as a central figure in the film’s exploration of the mounting pressure on independent journalists in Russia. Anna served as a co-director of the film, with Julia Loktev.
Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
2:45 How the film came about
5:25 A primer on Russian censorship and repression
15:15 “Foreign agents” and “undesirable organizations”
23:32 Social marginalization through the creation of an enemies list
28:46 State persecution of TV Rain and other independent media
32:45 The manipulation of language
36:30 Identifying the pivotal moment
43:36 How the film captures the elimination of press freedoms
48:26 Courts and lawyers
53:27 The Kremlin’s public mobilization to support the war in Ukraine
58:53 Independent journalism in exile
1:02:17 Parallels to the United States under Trump
Further Reading:
Chang, Justin, “‘My Undesirable Friends: Part I’ Is a Staggering Portrait of Russian Journalists in Dissent,” New Yorker (Aug. 14, 2025)
Edel, Anastasia, “Putin vs. the Press,” Foreign Policy (Oct. 3, 2025)
Human Rights Watch, Russia’s Legislative Minefield: Tripwires for Civil Society Since 2020 (2024)
Human Rights Watch, Disrupted, Throttled, and Blocked State Censorship, Control, and Increasing Isolation of Internet Users in Russia (2025)
Krupskiy, Maxim, “The Impact of Russia’s ‘Foreign Agents’ Legislation on Civil Society,” Fletcher Russia & Eurasia Program (2023)
Troinovski, Anton & Safronova, Valeriya, “Russia Takes Censorship to New Extremes, Stifling War Coverage,” New York Times (May 18, 2022)
Yablokov, Ilya & Gatov, Vasily, “Broadcasting through the (New) Iron Curtain: Practices, Challenges, and Legacies of Russia's Independent Media in Exile,” Journalism Studies (Feb. 11, 2025)
Publication Date
5-12-2026
Disciplines
Law
Recommended Citation
Hafetz, Jonathan, "Episode 58: My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow (2024) (Guest: Rachel Denber and Anna Nemzer)" (2026). Season 04. 11.
https://scholarship.shu.edu/law-on-film-s04/11
