Tanya Mosley

What made you decide that this devastating thing that happened to your family would be the first story you told as a filmmaker?

You know, I was really meditating on the name of your first documentary, Moment of Impact, and this is no unique thought.

You've talked about this before, but it does seem to be a through line through all of your work.

I'm thinking about day, night, day, night.

It hinges on this anticipation of an explosion.

And then there's My Undesirable Friends, and it captures these moments before the country tips into war.

Why do you think you keep returning to these pivot points where everything seems to change?

What do you think it is?

that you're trying to understand.

There's this sequence that you feature in the film, My Undesirable Friends, right after, I think it was like around February, end of February of 2022.

So Russia invades Ukraine.

And there's this sequence at TV Rain in those first few days where...

the journalists that you're following are watching the news hit in waves because this is the time period when Western companies then start pulling out one after the other.

So there are no Apple stores, no more Nike, no more Ikea.

And then they realize that they have to leave as well.

And you kept those cameras rolling.

How did that feel in the moment when you started to see these bigger institutions say, it's time for us to leave as well?

We see all of the old architecture.

We don't— Right, right.

This film was your way of doing something, and it's a film about Russia, but it also makes the viewer ask, what does it mean to be the opposition under a government that you oppose?