rewrite this title ‘My Undesirable Friends’ Wins Indie Film Site Network Advocate Award, Besting Other Top Oscar Contenders

EXCLUSIVE: Julia Loktev’s epic My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow has won the 2025 Indie Film Site Network Advocate Award, strengthening its bid for Academy Award recognition.

The IFSN awards, created to “highlight independent films each year that illuminate a humanitarian issue with a singular artistic vision,” comes with a singular prize for the winner: one million 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 included 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. Each of the finalists will be awarded 100K media impressions across IFSN.

Loktev, a Soviet-born American filmmaker, traveled to Moscow in 2021 “to make a film about independent journalists being declared ‘foreign agents’ by Putin’s regime,” notes a release, “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.”

“Structured in five chapters,” the release continues, “feeling like a cross between a Russian novel and a reality show about frighteningly real reality, Loktev’s film is an extraordinary historic 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.”

My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, with a running time of 5 hours and 24 minutes, has qualified for Oscar consideration this year.

“This is such an honor,” Loktev said of the IFSN Advocate Award. “The way audiences are experiencing this film has changed so much over the past months. 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.”

Jordan Raup, co-founder of IFSN and editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Film Stage, commented, “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. 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.”

The IFSN Advocate Award is selected by a jury of writers and editors from IFSN sites, with each site nominating a finalist and deliberating to choose a winner. Previous IFSN Advocate Award winners include No Other Land (directed by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor), D. Smith’s Kokomo City, and Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes.