Meryl Streep On How Fellow Oscar Winner Introduced Her To ‘My Undesirable Friends’ Documentary: “I Was Just Absolutely Entranced’

EXCLUSIVE: Meryl Streep has become a major fan of Julia Loktev’s epic two-part documentary My Undesirable Friends, an examination of brave women journalists in Russia who paid a heavy price for daring to report the truth in their country.

The three-time Oscar winner serves as an executive producer on My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile, Loktev’s follow up to the Oscar-shortlisted My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow (running time 5 hours 24 min.). Introducing a screening of Part II at Film Forum in New York City over the weekend, Streep explained how she came to see Part I last year while in the UK shooting The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, director Greta Gerwig’s film in which Streep plays the voice of the Christ-like figure Aslan.

“Last fall, I was in London playing God,” she joked, “and my friend Colin Firth called me up on Sunday and said, ‘Are you busy?’ And I said, ‘Colin, it’s my only day off, so no. I am going to do my laundry, and I have a lot of lines [to learn].’ And he said, ‘I just want you to look at this documentary [My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow]. I am trying to get it to the London Film Festival.’ And I said, ‘Oh, sure, documentary, an hour and a half.’ Doing my laundry, and I can get in bed by 9.”

Streep continued, “I sat down about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, which was close to when I had gotten up, and I stood up again five and a half hours later, not realizing that I had been sitting that long. I just was absolutely entranced by this story.”

Part I of My Undesirable Friends follows Anna Nemzer, Elena Kostyuchenko, Sonya Groysman, and other anchors and reporters for TV Rain, Novaya Gazeta and other Russian independent news outlets. Journalists who failed to tow the Kremlin party line were forced to declare themselves as foreign agents as part of a pressure campaign that ramped up dramatically ahead of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After the invasion, the journalists faced the prospect of imminent arrest if they remained in Russia; Part II of the documentary shows how they had to flee the country on extraordinarily short notice, in a matter of hours.

“[Part II] deals with the diaspora on the day after these intrepid young people, mostly women, put their lives in their backpacks, said goodbye to their families, their lives, their loves, their everything, and went they didn’t know where, or even how they would get there, or for how long, most importantly,” Streep said. My Undesirable Friends “really is all about how to deal with a future that is weirdly predictable but is still a shock when it arrives, and how to contend with what you can sense is coming, but the normal rolling out of each day seems kind of — doesn’t give you a signal as to when the present is going to blow up.”

Streep added, possibly in reference to anti-democratic trends in the U.S. and other countries: “That’s sort of where I feel like we are hovering now.”

My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile opened at Film Forum on October 9. It is set to open at the Siskel Film Center in Chicago on December 5.

Part II is directed by Julia Loktev, with cinematography by Loktev. The co-director is Anna Nemzer. Loktev and Michael Taylor edited the film. Loktev produced the film; Meryl Streep and Oscar winner Laura Poitras (Citizenfour) executive produced. The music is composed by Sami Buccella.

You can see the trailer here: