Russian opposition leader and former presidential candidate Alexei Navalny was on a flight from Siberia to Moscow in 2020 when he started to feel ill.
Navalny managed to get to Germany where he discovered he had been poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent.
From Germany, Navalny and his team including Christo Grozev from the investigative website Bellingcat, tried to find out who tried to poison him.
All of this is captured in the documentary called Navalny, directed by Canadian filmmaker Daniel Roher.
Canadian filmmaker Daniel Roher. Photo: ROB KIM
Roher tells Kim Hill he was trying to make a different film while in Austria, but it ended up going nowhere.
“I was sort of down on my luck. I didn’t have a film to make. It was in the middle of this pandemic. We were in lockdown.
“That’s when my colleague Christo Grozev, the brilliant journalist from Bellingcat, walked in one day into a meeting and said, ‘I think I have a lead on who tried to poison Alexi Navalny’.
“It was a stunning sentence, a stunning statement that I understood would fundamentally and dramatically change my life. A week later, I was driving across Germany to meet Navalny and the rest is history.”
He had to persuade the Russian opposition leader the value in this project, Roher says.
“I encouraged him to envision a potential future where he goes back to Russia and is arrested, he’s detained, he would need some sort of vehicle to keep his name, to keep his fight in the global consciousness.
“What I pitched to him was that a documentary film could be such a vehicle, could have an emotional cinematic resonance that would allow people to know his story and care about him deeply and I think he understood the value in that.”
Investigative journalist Christo Grozev, who worked alongside them, was previously skeptical of Navalny and was suspicious of his history with the far-right early on in his career.
Roher says they were able to address these concerns in the film, with Navalny not having anything off limits.
“A lot of the stories that I had read about his past flirtations with the far right did not match the engaging, very progressive man that I came to know, and I think contextualising his flirtation with the far right was critically valuable to the movie.”
Navalny’s argument was that he would need broad support to challenge Putin and his regime.
“There are a lot of people who have watched the film and have not been satisfied with that argument, have said that it’s dangerous rhetoric and this is what strong men say before they become strong men,” Roher says.
“And I get that criticism, I totally understand it, and I in no way will exonerate or been an apologist for this aspect of Navalny’s political history but this is a political calculation that he has made. He thinks it’s the right thing to do for his political cause.”
The astonishing climax of the documentary is when Navalny tricks one of his alleged poisoners into confessing – footage of which was spread on social media.
“I had no expectations that anything would be revealed. None of us did. We thought it might be an interesting set piece, I might as well shoot it,” Roher says.
“I never could have imagined that we would have captured anything as extraordinarily salacious as the phone call that we did where Konstantin Kudryavtsev, the FSB chemist, who was responsible for cleaning up the crime scene divulged, every morsel, every detail of how this plan was carried out, to the exact place where they poisoned Navalny, which was through, we now know, his underwear."
They don't know what happened to the man who divulged these details, but he disappeared, he says.
“We know that his wife divorced him, and he no longer lives at the address that was registered to him, his cellphones were turned off.
“We can’t be for certain what exactly has happened to him, I just know it’s not good.”
Navalny has been in prison in Russia since early 2021, convicted of charges generally suspected to be politically motivated.
Roher believes Russia is now regressing to a bygone darker era.
“Putinism resembles Stalinism in a very real and a very frightening way.
“And so I think it’s safe to say that the regime has frightened many people who hope for a democratic future for their country and Navalny has sacrificed himself, put himself forward as the moral leader of the nation and that’s why he’s languishing in prison right now.
“I believe Navalny's impact on Russian history is unrealised. This extraordinary story that we captured in our film is only the end of the first act of his story and I hope that he has the opportunity to run for the presidency of Russia.”
If it happens, Roher hopes to make a sequel on it.
Daniel Roher’s resulting film Navalny premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, winning several awards and is screening as part of the Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival in August.
