In Praise of Journalism, at a Difficult Time
March 6th-8th, 2026
Sag Harbor, NY – In the context of dramatic changes affecting the global media landscape, almost every day brings a new story of imperiled news outlets, of growing threats to the freedom of the press and of shrinking funds for in depth reporting, while floods of misinformation are created with the explicit objective of manipulating public opinion. As journalists continue to reckon with an onslaught of economic, political and legal threats, Sag Harbor Cinema pays tribute to their fine art – and how it relates to preserving truth, protecting memory, and holding authorities and institutions accountable – with screenings of Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow and Alan Berliner’s Letter to the Editor.
A winner for Best Feature Documentary at the 2025 Gotham Awards and for Best Non-Fiction Film at the 2025 New York Film Critics Circle, as well as a runner-up for the Academy Awards, My Undesirable Friends focuses on a group of independent journalists in Moscow, facing government crackdown, as Russia prepares to invade Ukraine. Director Julia Loktev and Ksenia Mironova, one of the reporters featured in the film, will be at the Cinema and will participate in a post-screening Q&A, on Saturday, March 7th.
Documentarian, artist, and friend of the Cinema Alan Berliner – whose exhibition “Think Like A Filmmaker” opened at Sag Harbor Cinema in October, 2024 – will return on Sunday, March 8th to present his 2019 Letter to the Editor, a personal ode to the printed press (and a meditation on what it means to stay informed in these challenging times), articulated through decades of photographs cut out from “The New York Times”.
This program was made possible by the generous support of Sag Harbor Cinema Board Member Esther Newberg, and was funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Tickets will be available at the box office or sagharborcinema.org.
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ABOUT THE FILMS
MY UNDESIRABLE FRIENDS: PART I – LAST AIR IN MOSCOW
Directed by Julia Loktev
USA | 2024 | 324 mins (two parts) | Russian with English subtitles
The film will be shown in two sections:
Crackdown: Chapters 1-3 (213 min. including a 15-min. intermission)
First Week of War: Chapters 4-5 (125 min.)
Each section is a separate admission.
American filmmaker Julia Loktev (The Loneliest Planet), born in the Soviet Union, returned to Moscow in 2021 to make a documentary on the persistence of independent journalism in Putin’s Russia—just months, as it turned out, before the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. With her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk show journalist for TV Rain, Russia’s last remaining independent news channel, Loktev ends up immersing herself with a group of young women fighting to ensure the vocalization of dissent and outspoken criticism of the country—even as they are branded by the government as “foreign agents,” their careers and lives increasingly at risk as the country creeps toward war. Structured in five chapters, Loktev’s film, the climactic days of which were filmed in Moscow during the first week of the invasion, when most independent journalists fled the country, is an extraordinary vérité document of a moment of immense change and anxiety, as well as a vital depiction of the eternal hope that so many in Russia hold for living in a democratic state.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Directed by Alan Berliner
USA | 2019 | 85 mins | English
Composed entirely of photographs cut out from printed editions of The New York Times over the past 40 years, Letter to the Editor is the personal musings of a news junkie, the culmination of his decades-long love affair with the printed newspaper, and an elegy for the death of the printed newspaper in the digital age. In 1980, when he was 23 years old, filmmaker Alan Berliner began collecting photographs from the printed edition of the New York Times, amassing tens of thousands of images over the decades in a vast personal archive. Forty years later, at a time when the newspaper is in an existential battle to survive, Berliner employs his unique collage-like approach to an excavation of the newspaper, and what it means to him personally and politically. With both solemn seriousness and a visual whimsy, the film explores the declining role (and impending disappearance) of the newspaper in the face of transformative advances in media and digital technology — 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.
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About the Sag Harbor Cinema
As a not-for-profit 501(c)3, community-based organization, Sag Harbor Cinema is dedicated to presenting the past, present and future of the Movies and to preserving and educating about films, filmmaking, and the film-going experience in its three state-of-the-art theaters. The Cinema engages its audiences and the community year-round through dialogue, discovery, and appreciation of the moving image – from blockbusters to student shorts and everything in between. Revitalized and reimagined through unprecedented community efforts to rebuild the iconic Main Street structure after a fire nearly destroyed it in 2016, SHC continues a long historic tradition of entertainment in the heart of Sag Harbor Village.