Well, as the characters of my favorite TV series ‘The Wire’ used to say: ‘You only do two days. After a year in jail, he was sentenced last month to nine more years for fraud in a case that the State Department condemned as a “sham ruling.” On Twitter, Navalny was characteristically undeterred. When Navalny landed in Moscow in early 2021, he was greeted by throngs of supporters - and quickly detained. “Getting this film out in the world will help the world understand that Vladimir Putin is not Russia and Russia is not Vladimir Putin,” says Roher, the Canadian filmmaker of “Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band." “What Alexei Navalny is an alternate vision of what the country could be.”
With Roher's fly-on-the-wall cameras, a real-life political thriller unspools starring a very charismatic Putin foe. In one unbelievable scene - perhaps the first to ever fuse John le Carré and the Jerky Boys - Navalny calls Kremlin agents behind the attack while posing as a Russian bureaucrat filing a report, getting one to divulge plenty of details. In between, Navalny makes his case for an alternative to Putin while often comically sifting through the details of his near death. “Navalny,” which will stream on HBO Max at a later date, was intimately filmed with the Russian opposition leader as he recuperated from the Novichok attack in Germany with his family, and resolved to return to Moscow despite the clear risks. “There have been so many awfully wrong things that we didn’t react strongly enough to. Putin could have been stopped in many points in history: after Crimea, after using chemical weapons, after running this assassination squad,” she said. “The world could have and should have understood earlier. “Now, it doesn’t seem like it’s such a big leap of faith.” “When we did the investigation in 2020, I struggled with: How am I going to convince Russian audiences and the world that what I’m saying is true - that the president of a large country that wants to be a moral leader in the world has been assassinating people?" Grozev said in a recent interview. (The Kremlin has denied it.) At the time, Grozev wondered if it would seem too far fetched that Putin would go to such Bond villain extremes. Grozev uncovered that Navalny had been attacked with the nerve agent Novichok and that the alleged assassination attempt was the work of a Kremlin spy unit. “Navalny," directed by Daniel Roher, is a gripping portrait of the Russian dissident beginning with the 2020 poisoning that nearly killed him, and which Grozev traced directly to the Kremlin. When Christo Grozev, executive director of the investigative collective Bellingcat, recently re-watched the new documentary “Navalny,” about the imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, he was struck by how much the film affected him differently since Vladimir Putin launched Russia's war in Ukraine.
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