We are proud to be a part of a network of sites that has awarded Julia Loktev’s stunning “My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow” with the 2025 IFSN Advocate Award. Other films cited as essential ones of 2025 include “Cutting Through Rocks,” “Familiar Touch,” “The Perfect Neighbor,” “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” and “The Voice of Hind Rajab.” Please see the official press release below:

Indie Film Site Network (IFSN) has announced Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow as the recipient of the 2025 IFSN Advocate Award. The award was established in 2022 to highlight independent films each year that illuminate a humanitarian issue with a singular artistic vision. The top prize is awarded one million (1M) media impressions across the Indie Film Site Network, which represents The Film Stage, Hammer to Nail, IONCINEMA.com, Next Best Picture, RogerEbert.com, and Slant Magazine. Letterboxd is also contributing to the award.

Finalists for the 2025 IFSN Advocate Award are Sara Khaki and Mohammad Reza Eyni’s ​​Cutting Through Rocks, Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch, Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor, Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, and Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, which will each be awarded 100K media impressions across IFSN. 

Soviet-born American filmmaker Julia Loktev (The Loneliest Planet, Day Night Day Night) came to Moscow in 2021 to make a film about independent journalists being declared “foreign agents” by Putin’s regime—as it turns out, just four months before Russia started a full-scale war in Ukraine. With her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk show host at TV Rain, Russia’s last remaining independent news channel, Loktev brings us into a community of sharp, warm, and funny young women speaking truth to power as they face increasing threats. Loktev filmed in Moscow during the first week of the full-scale invasion, as the journalists tried to counter Russian propaganda and report the truth on the war, until all independent media were shut down and they were forced to flee the country. Structured in five chapters, feeling like a cross between a Russian novel and a reality show about frighteningly real reality, Loktev’s film is an extraordinary historical record of a country on the verge of fascism and an immersive and intimate inside view of the opposition in an authoritarian society, which becomes all the more globally relevant every day.

“This is such an honor. The way audiences are experiencing this film has changed so much over the past months,” said Julia Loktev. “It’s gone from being a film about journalists fighting an authoritarian regime in a far away place, to hitting very close to home in the U.S. People keep telling me the film has helped them process the current moment, which is also a form of advocacy—a reminder not to ignore the warning signs and, hopefully, an inspiration to keep fighting even when the fight sometimes feel lost.”

“As the vital right of the freedom of press continues to be eroded across the world, Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow intimately and exhaustively captures the Putin regime’s calculated dismantling of what should be a universal certainty,” said Jordan Raup, co-founder of IFSN and editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Film Stage. “In presenting the IFSN Advocate Award to Loktev, we also want to commend the courage of the film’s subjects––Anna Nemzer, Ksenia Mironova, Sonya Groysman, Olga Churakova, Irina Dolinina––for steadfastly reporting amidst the threat of immediate danger. We sincerely hope a U.S. distributor comes aboard to introduce this essential documentary to a wider audience.”

My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow premiered at the 2024 New York Film Festival, and subsequently played at Berlin International Film Festival, IDFA Best of Fests, Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, Visions du Réel Film Festival, and Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, among others. It received a U.S. qualifying run in August at Film Forum and is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

The IFSN Advocate Award, created by the network as part of its mission to celebrate and support indie film, is selected by a jury of writers and editors from IFSN sites, with each site nominating a finalist and deliberating to award a winner. Previous IFSN Advocate Award winners include Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor’s No Other Land, D. Smith’s Kokomo City, and Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes.

About Indie Film Site Network

Indie Film Site Network (IFSN) is a collaboration between well-respected media outlets covering the most essential developments in independent and international cinema. IFSN, which represents The Film Stage, Hammer to Nail, IONCINEMA.com, Next Best Picture, RogerEbert.com, and Slant Magazine, was created with a mission to support film criticism and foster an ever-growing community of indie film lovers. For more information, visit indiefilmsitenetwork.com. For sales and partnership inquiries, contact sales@3rdimpression.com.

I grew up with Wolfgang Petersen’s films. I saw them in theaters; they were always on TV. The fabled original cut of “Das Boot” seemed to be the holy grail of VHS collectors for a long time (it seems quaint now, in the age of boutique Blu-ray boxes, to imagine much being hard to find). But the one thing I missed was…well… his purpose. What did he want to say? The German films made sense to me; they’re probing post-war male studies, and “Das Boot” was specifically a story of his own German naval officer father (we can only assume uncomfortable questions about his service record must have come out before filming), and he shied away from neither controversy nor ugliness. But then he made “The NeverEnding Story,” and it was like a different director had taken over. The critique of the government went up and down, back and forth, until finally it became too much work to parse a political sensibility in movies that demanded you switch the light off in your frontal lobe and watch the dumb spectacle. “Enemy Mine,” “In The Line of Fire,” “Troy,” “Air Force One,” “Poseidon”—peaks and valleys. Didn’t seem worthy of all that much specialist scrutiny. 

And then I saw “Shattered.” 

Suddenly, I could see the whole story. He was swimming the dirty river of the American erotic cinema, the things you shut the door while watching in your bedroom. Not only did he make a grand entry in the subgenre, I’d argue that he produced the most satisfying high-budget, high-gloss erotic thriller of the era. Sure, it wants for some of Joe Eszterhas’s gymnastics in the dialogue, and could have used Verhoeven’s stark framing, sure, sure, yes. But what Petersen did here is so heedless, so charged, so…erotic that I stopped caring about anything about the flow of the images. This was a Sirkian melodrama (complete with “Magnificent Obsession’s” surgical fixation) taken by the endorphin rush of rediscovering identity through sexuality.

What Petersen understood was that people didn’t come to this genre for realism…or so he was led to believe by box office figures. Turns out everyone had limits. The film was one of his rare financial failures. Not me, though. I have no limits. And so I soaked up the hazy, sweaty vibes of the piece, awed by each new composition and lighting set-up. This is what American studio films ought to still look like. 

Musicals often feel like one of the most divisive film genres out there. The constant belting of your narrative and feelings through song can be seen as impassioned for some and grating for others. You know, I’m kind of in the middle there. Sometimes the only way to fully encapsulate the magnitude of the emotions and setting is through a grand musical number with aggressively detailed choreography. Films like La La Land, Chicago, and Moulin Rouge all succeed in this realm for me because everything feels appropriate and significant. 

But 2024 has not really captivated me with its musical offerings so far. Mean Girls didn’t really nail the jump from stage to screen, and Emilia Perez’s existence as a musical never really felt justified outside of an apparent need to be the most unique film of the year. So that brings us to Wicked, the adaptation of the acclaimed theater production, which I will say, out of the three musicals I’ve seen this year, I do think it’s the best, but is it good?

Wicked’s successes lie in its performances, from its lead stars to even its background roles tearing the dancefloor up. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande have the kind of enemies-to-friends chemistry that makes their journey quite entertaining to watch. When the musical moments hit, they can really hit, even though the whole soundtrack isn’t a complete collection of bangers. But with all these positives, it’s a shame that my biggest issues come from the film’s presentation, from its questionable visual style to its thinly stretched narrative. I’ll be the first to admit it isn’t the emerald-coated train crash I might have been expecting, but I do feel confident that with all the visually expressive filmmaking out there, we do have the right to expect a little bit more.

So Wicked tells the tale of the Wicked Witch of the West before she became a cackling, easily meltable villainess. She was once an outcast girl named Elphaba, whose untapped magical powers earns her a seat at Shiz University. While there, she becomes unwilling roommates with spoiled airhead Galinda, who has great dreams of becoming a sorcerer. The two eventually form a budding friendship as Elphaba works her way to a meeting with the great Wizard of Oz, while also becoming aware of a huge conspiracy that boils underneath the magical world.

As I said before, the performances absolutely nail their roles, most obviously with Erivo and Grande. Erivo undeniably has one of the most powerful voices out there right now, which absolutely pays off as Elphaba rises from being reserved and understated to an undeniable force to be reckoned with. From an acting standpoint, Erivo does an admirable job, though I did find her characterization to be a tad underdeveloped. It’s easy to want to see her succeed thanks to the cartoonish malice and lepper-like reactions she receives, but I didn’t feel anything deeper than that. Her wants and goals don’t always feel entirely realized, while her inner turmoil over her perceived role in her mother’s death never really comes to the forefront in how she acts or develops. You would think that a part one with a runtime that matches the entire length of the original stage production would give the film more time for character development, but really, it just gives more room to dance around the idea. Sometimes a shorter amount of time is better, because you have to get right to the point and not beat around the bush. 

Then there’s Grande, who I admittedly had the most concerns about going into this. Sure she can sing, but it’s been a minute since I’ve seen her act. Luckily, the role of Galinda is the absolute perfect role for her. Bubbly and ditzy, yet possessing the volume for change, Grande shines through a character that could have been incredibly one note, but actually receives the most character development out of the two. I do think a little more could have been given, considering she eventually turns on and rejects her friend later down the line. The rumblings of this are shown in the film’s climax, but their severance ended up being purely physical while I think there could have been a slight dash of methodical thrown in to hint at what’s to come. Even still, I was surprised to find Grande to be my favorite part of the film, from her rich girl obliviousness to her capacity to do good outside of appearance-based rewards.

I said earlier that even the smaller performances help fill out the world, even though I mostly just meant the background actors who help bring the musical numbers to life, even if they do like an assortment of 30-year-olds playing teenagers. The other supporting roles are a bit mixed; some aren’t really giving much, while others aren’t really given anything to work with to begin with. Jonathan Bailey’s Fiyero had “show stealer” written all over him, but he isn’t given a ton to do and disappears rather quickly without really revealing what he’s all about. Michelle Yeoh and Jeff Goldblum, as much as I love them, are nothing to write home about here. They do exactly what their characters demand of them and nothing greater. Yes, Goldblum talks and acts exactly how you’d expect him to. 

It’s been talked about to death at this point, but yeah, the film’s color palette is pretty muted and flat. It’s not terrible to the point where it looks unrecognizable to the source material, but you would expect a film connected to one of the landmark films of technicolor to burn a little brighter. Director John M. Chu stated this was done to give the film more groundability and to make it more believable, which one, more color doesn’t disconnect us from this being a fully realized world, and two, why? Why would you be afraid to have a land filled with talking animals and cities of emerald come off as fantastical? When the film does commit to bolder colors, it kind of just looks gaudy next to the rest of the world. It doesn’t help that the film is lit so flatly, lacking in dramatic shadows to give it some depth. And the backlighting, my God, it looks like a warhead is detonating off in the distance in some scenes, particularly the Dancing Through Time number. It was really distracting, often incredibly glaring to the point where it was hiding character’s facial expressions for no real reason.

But what isn’t an eyesore is a lot of the beautiful set design the film has to offer. Gorgeously constructed sets of stone and crystal look phenomenal, with some of them really tying into their musical sequences, like the revolving library in the aforementioned Dancing Through Time scene. Most of the time the presentation of these scenes is pretty serviceable with the choreography and blocking, though I did find how these scenes were presented to be occasionally boring, both from a directing and cinematography standpoint. This is the same director as In the Heights, a film I thought did a lot of creative things with how it utilized the city as a focal point of the film, and I didn’t really find that here. But John M. Chu isn’t completely sauceless here, I just found him to be a bit lopsided. There’s a moment of dancing between Elphaba and Galinda with no music that really moved me in its simplicity. It was the most I was moved by the whole film, which feels like an issue, considering this is a play with Defying Gravity as the final song. That scene, though impressively performed by Erivo, is so drowned in ugly CGI and messy presentation that those booming vocals didn’t have the intended effect on me like they were anticipating. I don’t know, these are things most people probably won’t care about, but after getting spoiled with stuff like 2021’s West Side Story, I know more can be done here in the visual medium.

Wicked is bound to satisfy fans of the stage performance as it faithfully brings its charm and energy to the big screen. But if you’re like me, someone who has only heard the soundtrack and wasn’t all that pulled in by it, you may not be as electric for it. Thankfully its leading ladies dominate their screen time despite a handful of elements working against them. It does feel very long and doesn’t always manage to maintain its momentum, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested to see where this goes. Especially because theater heads have told me the back-half of the play is the least interesting part, so I guess we’ll see. But yeah, it’s a fine enough film underneath modern trappings like poor lighting and so-so visual effects that haunt me to no end, but families are still sure to like it. Can we just stop with Best Picture predictions for it already? Recency bias feels like a hell of a drug.

RATING

GALINDA FIZZ

Known for being bubbly (both in personality and as a motif) Galinda felt like a great subject to center a cocktail around. I decided to do some experimenting with bubblegum flavored vodka, a flavor that may be divisive as it’s not a typically culinary ingredient. But, when paired with cooling peppermint and sweet raspberry, I think it creates something magical. To really up the magic of the cocktail (along with its sweetness and color), I made a sparkling wand from a Blowpop and pink sanding sugar that you can use as a stirring device that also adds a little bit of sweetness to the cocktail!

INGREDIENTS

• 2oz bubblegum-infused vodka
• 1/2oz lemon juice
• 1/2oz peppermint schnapps
• 1/2oz raspberry liqueur
• Top: Soda water
• Garnish: Pink sugar coated Blowpop

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Add ingredients to a tall glass, with the soda water being last.
2. Coat your Blowpop with the sugar, using either lemon juice or your own saliva (if you’re making the drink for yourself)
3. Stir the drink with the Blowpop, adding additional sugar if you’d like to play with the color.
4. Add ice.