By David D’Arcy

Three fine documentaries at the NYFF: two delved into political matters, the third looked around New York City in 1965.

A journalist in the offices of the independent and now-closed TVRain in Moscow in the documentary film My Undesirable Friends. Photo: courtesy of the NYFF

At the New York Film Festival, two documentaries looked at politics. One explored the climate of fear and the eventual exodus of Russian journalists reporting on the invasion of Ukraine, another presented the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford as remembered by the would-be killer herself, a former housewife in California. A third doc revisited New York in 1965.

It was hard enough to be a journalist in Russia before the invasion of Ukraine, especially if you wanted to report on the government, which, given its influence, meant reporting on almost everything that went on. Reporters who covered wars turned up dead. Journalists who covered corruption were attacked and jailed. Those who wrote about LGBTQ issues or immigrants or violence against women were shunned or threatened. Some were just arrested and locked up.

My Undesirable Friends: Part One – Last Air in Moscow, the documentary by the Russian-born journalist Julia Loktev, which just played at the New York Film Festival, begins by tapping into the ominous chill that set in when Russian prepared for its war on Ukraine. For one thing, it wasn’t a war, but a “special military operation.” Any coverage that wasn’t favorable put journalists under special scrutiny. Reporting that didn’t follow the official line was perceived to be disloyal, and journalists who demurred were seen as harmful to the state, which automatically classified them as foreign agents. These were not mere epithets, but epithets codified into law, with real penalties.

On camera, we see this process of intimidation and punishment undercut the journalists of TV Rain — mostly young, mostly women working for the last independent television news channel in Russia. Some of their colleagues were already in jail. Others were routinely followed by police, or had their communications bugged.

These are the friends and colleagues of Loktev, who films them as they work and socialize. Loktev borrowed a camera to chronicle the lives of her subjects. When she couldn’t make it work she used an iPhone 10 instead. My Undesirable Friends seems to sacrifice nothing in quality, and captures everything, from intimate gatherings among the group to the urban geography, the long vistas of Moscow’s wide avenues.

Her doc in five episodes offers a rare examination of the round-the-clock operations of a newsroom — frank interviews, detailed information, and constant updates. It also probes into these journalists’ lives — they are remarkably wholesome, built around bonds with co-workers who bake cakes for each other when they have time off. This was civil society, or what was left of it. If these are enemies of the state, then the state is afraid of independent behavior and thought. The journalists are right to be afraid of their own police.

As the rhetoric heats up over the conflict in Ukraine, you can feel the journalistic space constricting. Putin makes threats. Regime-friendly media, which was almost all the media back then, echoes the Kremlin’s official messages about the dangers of foreign agents in the general population. The journalists wonder if they’re next.

This is a film about politics, but it is also about friendship. Loktev has some memorable co-workers. Anna Nemzer is a confident, aggressive interviewer. Ksenia Mironova is young and relatively new to her profession, but old enough to handle a firsthand view of a growing crisis. Her journalist partner is already in prison. She waits outside a jail in the winter cold, hoping for a chance to see him. Not a chance. He has since been sentenced to 22 years.

The film lurches between scenes of foreboding and fun in the holiday season before the invasion.The chapters of this tender but chilling doc all point to departures that the journalists were planning — better to be in exile than in jail. Eventually, all in their group left. Russians will now know even less about what their government does. TV Rain now operates today out of the Netherlands.

Sara Jane Moore in the documentary Suburban Fury. Photo: courtesy of the NYFF

In Suburban Fury, a doc by Robinson Devor that made its world premiere at the New York Film Festival, we meet Sara Jane Moore. To quote from a hundred other movies, she’s alive.

For those who don’t remember, Sara Jane Moore is the former suburban housewife who took a shot at President Gerald Ford in front of the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square in San Francisco in 1975. The barrel of her pistol wasn’t properly aligned, which may be why she missed, but she wasn’t repentant at the time about the assassination attempt. Experts said she would have killed him had the gun been properly maintained. Moore was tried and sentenced to life in prison. She got out after 32 years.

Moore has spoken before about what led to her action: as she recovered from dull marriages she was inspired by the revolutionary rhetoric of African-American activists. She talked for years to the journalist Geri Spieler, but stopped cooperating on a book. Spieler went ahead and in 2009 authored Moore’s biography, Taking Aim at the President, updated in 2023 as Housewife Assassin: The Woman Who Tried to Kill President Ford. For this film, on terms that director Devor accepted, she talks again.

Moore, now 94, set some strict rules for her presence. She is the only one who is interviewed. Yet Devor does counter her version of things via an Errol Morris one-on-one format that called on him to interrupt her regularly, often angering her. Moore’s memory is good, and she likes to tell her story her way — childhood in West Virginia, the WACS in the army, multiple marriages (one to a man who worked in film), boredom, another bad marriage to a doctor in suburbia, and then the pull of radical politics, which led to her decision to buy and use a gun. Along the way, she became an informer for the FBI; the bureau downplayed worries from police that she was armed and might be dangerous.

This was 1975, after Watergate and the flight of US troops from Vietnam. The end of the draft led to the collapse of the antiwar movement. All that was left for some radicals were hopes for revolution from a substitute proletariat in the country’s prisons.

Devor gives us a sense of the shredded politics of those days, when Patricia Hearst was kidnapped in Berkeley and turned up with a machine gun, alongside her captors from the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). At that point, Hearst’s story intersected with that of Moore, who worked with a charity funded by Hearst’s father to provide food for the poor of the Bay Area, as ordered by his daughter’s kidnappers. Moore had worked as an accountant and was initially welcomed, complete with her suburban preppy attire. She was fired when she proved too hard to control. The FBI would eventually find out just how uncontrollable its informant was.

Suburban Fury, a title that describes Moore’s personality then and now, is an archival adventure, with stories and characters whirling in and out of focus. Corrupt politicians Agnew and Nixon give way to the bland, lumbering Ford, who was targeted in two assassination attempts, both in California, within weeks of each other. If the FBI was asleep at the wheel about Moore, the Secret Service was just as clueless when she decided to take a shot at Ford, a large target. The left was also adrift at the time: Hearst’s kidnappers in the rag-tag SLA jumped into the void and got themselves on television. Sara Jane Moore shot her way into some of the same kind of media attention.

Enigmatic, possessing what seems to be a keen memory, Moore chronicles her political meanderings, which seem no less confused than her times. Anyone watching might wonder why a woman who tried to kill the president would ever be let out of prison. But the law puts a limit on the years of incarceration for an attempted murder, especially when the prisoner has a creditable record behind bars, which was dubious in her case. Who knew? Devor avoids making Moore a mere talking head by interviewing her as she sits in a car, looking down across San Francisco, composing a wry visual metaphor for her journey to and from the penitentiary. The landscape around her seems graceful and orderly; this dizzying film reminds us that it was anything but.

One of the few scenes featuring the Beatles in TWST – Things We Said Today. Photo: courtesy of the NYFF

Ranging farther back into recent history, the veteran Romanian director Andrei Ujica was at the the NY Film Festival with TWST – Things We Said Today, an archival reconstruction of the goings-on around the Beatles’ concert at Shea Stadium in 1965. We see the Fab Four land in New York, but we don’t see a lot of them in this film, which is more interested in watching their love-struck teenage fans or in observing the grim racial violence in Los Angeles, some which is described in French by a local Black man for a French TV crew. Ujica then takes us to the World’s Fair in New York (Shea Stadium was part of that spectacular hodge-podge), reminding us that buildings and styles intended to look modern can often look old very fast. Ujica made his name as a filmmaker tracking the fall of his country under the vain dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. New York is a new territory for his collage technique — but once he gets going, you don’t miss the Beatles.

David D’Arcy lives in New York. For years, he was a programmer for the Haifa International Film Festival in Israel. He writes about art for many publications, including the Art Newspaper. He produced and co-wrote the documentary Portrait of Wally (2012), about the fight over a Nazi-looted painting found at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.