At a time of growing threats to freedom of the press and shrinking funds for in-depth reporting even as deliberate misinformation is spreading, the Sag Harbor Cinema is showing two films that pay tribute to the increasingly imperiled practice of independent journalism.
“My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 — Last Air in Moscow,” directed by Julia Loktev, focuses on a group of independent journalists in Moscow who face government crackdown as Russia prepares to invade Ukraine. The film, five and a half hours long, will be shown in two parts.
“Crackdown,” the first three chapters of “My Undesirable Friends,” will be shown tomorrow at 5:30 p.m. and Saturday at 1 p.m. “First Week of War,” chapters four and five, will screen Saturday at 5:30 and Sunday at 7. Ms. Loktev and Ksenia Mironova, one of the reporters featured in the film, will take part in a conversation on Saturday after the 5:30 screening.
Ms. Loktev, an American filmmaker born in the Soviet Union, returned to Moscow in 2021 to document the persistence of independent journalism there. With a friend, Anna Nemzer, a journalist for TV Rain, Russia’s last remaining independent news channel, she immersed herself in a group of young women who were fighting to ensure the continued existence in Russia of dissent and outspoken criticism.
Branded by their government as “foreign agents,” their careers and lives were increasingly at risk as the country edged toward war. The climactic days of the film were shot in Moscow during the first week of the invasion, when most independent journalists fled the country.
Justin Chang wrote in The New Yorker that “Loktev’s accomplishment in this extraordinarily human cinematic document is to simply keep filming — to cling fast to her camera, and to keep it focused on the remarkable sight of young people showing exemplary courage.”
The cinema’s second offering, the 2019 “Letter to the Editor,” is by Alan Berliner, a documentary filmmaker and artist. It is composed entirely of photographs cut from printed editions of The New York Times over the past 40 years.
Mr. Berliner is no stranger to the cinema, which in 2024 presented “Think Like a Filmmaker,” showing art objects that he created from his extensive collection of filmmaking tools and equipment. His films have been shown worldwide and won prizes, awards, and retrospectives at international film festivals.
In 1980, when he was 23 years old, Mr. Berliner began collecting photographs from The Times, amassing tens of thousands of images over the subsequent decades into a vast personal archive.
At a time when newspapers are struggling to survive, “Letter to the Editor” uses a collage-like approach to unearth the artifacts and show what they mean to him both personally and politically. The film explores the declining role of the newspaper in the face of transformative advances in media and digital technology. The cinema calls it “a baby boomer’s lament on the end of an era, on coping with change, on time passing, on growing old, and on staying informed and engaged during these challenging and uncertain times.”
“Letter to the Editor” will be shown on Sunday afternoon at 4:30. A question-and-answer session with Mr. Berliner will follow the screening.
