Venice festival's Russian exile film echoes Marche's own cinematic ties

At the Venice Film Festival, director Julia Loktev is moving audiences with the second part of her documentary 'My Undesirable Friends,' which follows Russian journalists forced to flee the country who continue to report on the war in Ukraine from abroad, Le Monde reported Sunday. The film immerses viewers in the precarious conditions and ongoing intimidation faced by reporters working in exile.

The screening resonates beyond the festival circuit. For the Marche region, where cinema has long been a window onto displacement and identity, the documentary's themes of exile and journalism under pressure touch on a regional character shaped by emigration and return.

Le Monde's review describes Loktev's film as one that 'moves audiences' with its intimate portrayal of journalists who abruptly left Russia but persist in informing their fellow citizens about the war. The documentary captures the paradox of modern exile: reporters who cannot return home but whose work remains anchored to their homeland's fate.

The Marche connection is cultural rather than political. The region has produced and hosted filmmakers who explored similar terrain of displacement, most notably the tradition of Italian neorealism's regional inheritors who documented the post-war movement from countryside to city. More recently, the region has become a backdrop for films examining migration across the Adriatic, the sea that separates Italy from the Balkans and beyond.

Venice's role as a European gateway for such stories carries particular weight for the Adriatic coast. The Marche ports of Ancona and Pesaro have historically been points of departure and arrival, and the region's dispersed town-and-country settlement pattern has made it a quiet observer of the movements that shape the continent.

The festival continues through mid-September, with Loktev's documentary among the works drawing attention to press freedom at a moment when journalism faces threats across Europe and beyond. For audiences in the Marche, the film offers a reminder that the region's own newspaper tradition, rooted in small-town printing houses and family-run dailies, belongs to the same craft of bearing witness that the exiled Russian journalists practise under far graver conditions.

As the festival programme unfolds, the international attention on Venice's screens reflects a wider European conversation about information, exile and the resilience of those who report despite the cost. The Marche, with its own history of voices that left and those that stayed, holds a quiet stake in that conversation.