Indie Docuseries Wins Top Award, Primed for Oscar Nod

In a significant achievement, the epic docuseries "My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow" by Soviet-born American filmmaker Julia Loktev has won the 2025 Indie Film Site Network (IFSN) Advocate Award. The IFSN awards, created to highlight independent films that illuminate humanitarian issues, come with a substantial prize of one million media impressions across the Indie Film Site Network.

Loktev's film, which has a runtime of 5 hours and 24 minutes, has now qualified for Oscar consideration this year. The documentary provides an extraordinary historic record of Russia on the verge of fascism, offering an immersive and intimate inside view of the opposition in an authoritarian society. Loktev traveled to Moscow in 2021, just four months before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, to capture the stories of independent journalists, including her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk show host at TV Rain, Russia's last remaining independent news channel.

The IFSN Advocate Award is selected by a jury of writers and editors, and Loktev's film was chosen from a pool of finalists that included several other acclaimed independent films. The award not only recognizes the film's artistic merit but also its powerful advocacy for the vital right of press freedom, which continues to be eroded across the world.