In the fall of 2021, the director Julia Loktev traveled from her Brooklyn home to Moscow, with the intent to film some friends under pressure. That summer, the Russian government had cracked down on the remaining independent media in the country, designating outlets and journalists it found irksome as “foreign agents”. Loktev, who moved to the US from the Soviet Union at age nine, had several journalist friends now required to submit detailed financial reports to the government and affix an all-caps disclaimer to any output, be it an article or an Instagram post of their cat, declaring it the work of a foreign agent.
Loktev began shadowing her friend Anna Nemzer, a host on the country’s only remaining independent news channel, TV Rain (Dozhd, in Russian), which was on the growing list of “foreign agents” meant to chill any press critical of Vladimir Putin’s regime. She was particularly interested in Sonya Groysman and Olga Churakova, two female journalists in their 20s who, with youthful gusto, started the podcast Hi, You’re a Foreign Agent to document how their new notoriety affected their lives. “I thought I was making a film about these young journalists who were dealing with this. I thought it was going to be called The Lives of Foreign Agents,” Loktev recalled recently. “I thought I was making a film about people trying to figure out how you live in a country where you oppose the government. How long can you keep working? How do you keep fighting when you live under a regime you oppose?”
