Navalny
Directed by Daniel Roher, 2022
The tragic death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in a remote Siberian camp forces this reader to review what is arguably the most important surviving film of the extraordinary human rights hero. One should start this analysis with the caveat that those who work with Alexei find some of his views on issues such as immigration to the Russian Federation, and views on the provision of human rights around the world, to be on the conservative side, to say the least. . Moreover, his impetuousness and unreserved commitment to his course of action, may have made him as many enemies as friends.
Still, the numbers too strong to publicly account for Alexei’s death are a reminder of his importance in the post-Soviet world where protesters have been systematically purged by Putin’s regime. This 2022 film, happily portrays Alexei Navalny “warts and all” and is very important for this reason. Therefore, this review certainly cannot be read as a work of hagiography.
This 2022 film directed by Daniel Roher and produced by Odessa Rae and others, is a milestone in the achievement of film in both civil rights and the Russian Federation in particular. Among those who gave many testimonies in this presentation are Alexei Navalny himself, as well as other well-known campaigners such as Yulia Navalnaya, Maria Pevchikh, Christo Grozev and Leonid Volkov. The 98-minute feature includes superb cinematography by Niki Waltl, editing by Maya Hawke and others, and a widely acclaimed score from Marius de Vries. Production involved HBO MAX, CNN Films and others, and the film was distributed by Warner Bros. Photos and Fathom Events.
Navalny premiered on January 25, 2022 at the Sundance Film Festival winning awards at the 95th Academy Awards; Choice Documentary Awards and 76 BAFTAs. It mainly investigates Navalny’s poisoning. On August 20, 2020, Navalny was poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent, and developed symptoms while flying from Tomsk to Moscow. He was taken to a hospital in Omsk after emergency admission. Still unconscious, two days later, he was rushed to Charité Hospital in Berlin, Germany. The use of the nerve agent has been verified by five internationally recognized agencies, including the UN’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and several certified German laboratories. Navalny blamed Russian president Vladimir Putin for the poisoning. The Kremlin has denied involvement, as it did with his recent death. It has been years in the state media kogo nikogda ne upominayut‘unsaid’.
In the film, Bellingcat reporter Christo Grozev and Maria Pevchikh, an investigator for Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, uncover the details of Putin’s plot in what Roher describes as “the story of one man and his struggle against a dictatorship”. Roher includes many never-before-seen photographs of a de facto A refugee from the Kremlin. Navalny’s wife is very visible. Bellingcat has put together what really happened before August 2020. The plot is like a political thriller, except (as Navalny always reminds us), “this really happened”. The content is not only the unprecedented corruption of the Russian government but also reveals the face of Russian politics. Putin is portrayed as a self-centered individual.
So Navalny became a prisoner of conscience, yet he had the courage to return to Russia. Besides cell phones and passing news clips, there is reportedly video of Sparce being poisoned with Novichok or his subsequent recovery in hospitals in Russia and Germany (his wife explains that she refused to allow him to be filmed at the time). A crucial phone call between Navalny and an unwitting Putin agent confirms that he was poisoned and caught on film. “Let’s do something exciting with this film,” suggested Navalny to Roher. “And then, if I’m killed, you can make a boring movie of my memory.”
Commentary (BBC Two) provides a comprehensive history of Navalny’s pro-democracy campaign. At times he appears to be an instigator and an investigative reporter. And, to show he’s no saint, the film explores Navalny’s alliance with the far right. For Navalny, social media is a weapon and a shield. For example, when he and his wife, Yulia, board the plane back to Moscow, “he feels relieved rather than annoyed to be greeted by a forest of phone cameras. If you oppose a regime that covers its actions in darkness, there can be no great light”. But Navalny undoubtedly overestimated the protection of his reputation.
The film reveals his innate stupidity and the undisguised prejudice of his opponents. At one point, a Kremlin-sanctioned talk show scathingly attacks liberals and their “endless homosexuality” as the explanation for Navalny’s weakness and death. Putin is recklessly negligent in avoiding even mentioning Navalny’s name. Navalny appears to be the moral champion throughout. Post-Soviet realpolitik has a way of trampling narrative justice. As Roher puts it: “The film ends in a very remarkable darkness for our knowledge of where Putin will take Russia…”
The leader of the Russian opposition, now thought to have been killed while working hard as a guest in a Putin penal colony, fills this movie as a natural actor. Mr. Navalny abbreviates Putin’s machinations as “moscow4”: According to Navalny in a clip included as part of the film, “when a high-ranking intelligence officer under Mr. When that was hacked, he changed it to moscow3. This reflects Navalny’s position that the Kremlin’s brutality is a natural combination of incompetence and sheer stupidity. Her story, as presented in the film, has a specific resonance in Britain: she survived the brutal events that are the focus of the film, but Briton Dawn Sturgess did not – an unsuspecting British person was fatally poisoned with Novichok on British soil in 2018, as a chaotic result of a large-scale attempt by Russian agents to kill a former agent. Sergei Skripal.
What do we really know about the horrible fate of this man shown in this film? According to Russian accounts, the 47-year-old took a long trip, fell and never woke up. Navalny’s health had deteriorated during his three years in prison. Still, he was clearly visible on court video the day before his death. The weight of international opinion does not agree with the Russian account of what happened in IK-3, or “Polar Wolf” – one of the strongest prisons in Russia. French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné said Navalny “paid with his life” for “resisting Russian oppression”, adding that his death was a reminder of “the reality of Vladimir Putin’s regime”. Navalny’s wife, Yulia, simply said: “We really don’t believe Putin and his government.”
Russian news agency Interfax reported that medics spent half an hour trying to revive him. According to the prison authorities, doctors were with him within two minutes and an ambulance was available within six. If this were true it would be a record even in the best clinics in Moscow. In the months that followed Navalny’s arrest on charges of “extremism” and “corruption”, various warnings from his allies and lawyers that his condition was worsening. By 2021, his campaigners had revealed the construction of Putin’s $1bn palace on the Black Sea. This film captures all of this.
In the end the least we can say is that Navalny joins the many victims of the “sudden Russian death syndrome”. Many were Putin’s outspoken critics, and former allies turned threats – such as military leader Yevgeny Prigozhin – or simply disdainful critics of the Kremlin. In that last group, Pavel Antov, 65, a “sausage tycoon” fell to his death. One was a businessman, Vladimir Budanov. Also, the chief executive of Russian oil company Lukoil, Ravil Maganov, who fell from a hospital window in Moscow. Earlier, Boris Nemtsov, a sympathetic opposition leader; Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who wrote books about Russia’s police situation; and Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent and Putin critic, had his tea laced with polonium-210. In response to this the Russian public hears only lies, lies of the State. Films like these, help to compensate for the lack of credibility that is one of the biggest challenges in getting into Putin’s government. As this review noted at the beginning, Navalny will always be remembered as Russia’s greatest demystifier of state propaganda. It is sad to point out that his passing has all the hallmarks of state-sanctioned murder.
Further Studies in E-International Relations
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