For years, Russian American filmmaker Julia Loktev, who was born in the former Soviet Union, has been following young, mostly female journalists branded “foreign agents” by Putin’s regime. In their work, including for Russia’s last independent television channel, TV Rain, they faced draconian restrictions and the constant threat of imprisonment. Several of their fellow journalists have already been murdered or poisoned.
In Exile, Loktev takes you into the lives of these passionate women, who have by now fled their native country but continue their work from all over the world—Prague, Tbilisi, Amsterdam, Latvia, New York. They have been sentenced in absentia to prison on espionage charges. Yet many of them still hope to return home one day.
In the meantime, from exile, they continue reporting on the atrocities of the war in Ukraine, both through the relaunched TV Rain—first in Latvia and later in Amsterdam—and through their own channels. No one can silence them, as this monumental yet intimate documentary shows.
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