Daniel Roher (2022)

The Russian political dissident Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent and fell critically ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow in August 2020.  The young Canadian documentarian Daniel Roher started to film Navalny soon after he regained consciousness, following transfer from a hospital in Omsk to one in Berlin, and began his remarkable recovery.  Filming continued throughout his convalescence in Germany and right up to Navalny’s arrest the moment he set foot back in Russia, in January 2021.  At both the beginning and the end of his film, Roher asks Navalny what message he wants to leave his supporters if this turns out to be his last chance of doing so.  The first time this question is asked, Navalny brushes it aside, along with the prospect of being murdered.  He urges Roher to make not a ‘boring film of memory’ but ‘a thriller’.

Roher takes that instruction on board – not in a crass way, except that the film’s music, by Marius De Vries and Matt Robertson, tends to give superfluous ‘dramatic’ emphasis to what’s happening on the screen.  A good deal of the narrative is naturally suspenseful:  Roher realises that, in order to tell a compelling story, he need do no more than present it.  If he doesn’t avoid making a ‘film of memory’ it’s because events since January 2021 have made that impossible.  Within weeks of his arrest, Navalny was given a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence.  In March 2022, the sentence was increased by a further nine years.  Navalny’s detention until who knows when can’t fail to give Roher’s documentary a strongly elegiac flavour.  The result is anything but boring.

The film comprises four main elements.  There are interviews with Navalny and those close to him, including his wife and daughter; numerous examples of his YouTube and other social media activity; news film at various stages of his public career and of the events of August 2020; and the ‘action sequences’ filmed by Roher over the course of the next few months.  Once he was well enough, Navalny resumed his vigorous anti-corruption activism online.  He also worked with the Bulgarian journalist Christo Grozev, the lead Russia investigator for the Netherlands-based Bellingcat investigative journalism group.  Their collaboration supplies Navalny with its highlight sequence, one that authors of fictional thrillers (and black comedies) must envy.  Shortly before the Bellingcat website published details of the eight Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers who allegedly poisoned him, Navalny, posing as a government aide, started phoning each of the officers with an invitation to discuss the incident, supposedly for a report he’d been assigned to prepare.  With the second operative that he contacts, Navalny strikes gold:  Konstantin Kudryavtsev, swallowing the aide story, confirms that he and colleagues applied Novichok to the ‘inner seams’ of Navalny’s boxer shorts while they were in the laundry of the Tomsk hotel where he stayed.  (Kudryavtsev‘s gullibility is much more surprising than the news that, since this notorious phone conversation in December 2020, no more has been seen or heard of him.)  You listen to this sequence open-mouthed, until the point where you want to join in with the incredulous celebrations of Navalny, Grozev and their colleague Maria Pevchikh.

As Roher demonstrates, Vladimir Putin can’t bring himself to speak Navalny’s name and habitually refers to him as ‘this person’, with a view to minimising Navalny’s importance.  With plenty of evidence to suggest that Putin is as vain as he’s thuggish – the footage of his judo moves, the photos of him bare-chested astride on a horse, and so on – it must grieve Russia’s aging poster boy that his highest-profile adversary is a dynamic communicator with a handsome face and amazingly blue eyes.  In terms of screen time in Navalny, the Russian leader has a sizeable supporting role but the identity of the film’s star, and his star screen presence, seem bound to infuriate this person in the Kremlin.  Navalny himself is neither short of self-esteem nor a political progressive.  At least he didn’t seem that way until his public image crystallised into Putin’s bête noire.  Christo Grozev recalls that he once despaired of a Russian opposition whose leader kept company with neo-Nazis on freedom marches.  Roher raises this with Navalny, who insists, irritably though none too convincingly, that as broad a coalition as possible is needed to defeat Putin.

Alexei Navalny gives the impression of a colossal ego but there’s no doubt that he has, as well as charisma, courage to match.  So does his wife, Yulia; the couple’s relationship, as shown here, is increasingly affecting.  The big question that Daniel Roher doesn’t ask Navalny is why he has decided to return home rather than continue his campaigning work, in relative safety, outside Russia.  Roher has subsequently said in interview[1] that he thinks Navalny would have answered that question with one of his own:  ‘How am I supposed to, as the leader of the opposition, ask people to take to the streets, ask people to protest, ask people to put their lives and their careers and their families on the line, if I’m sitting comfortably in the West?’

At the end, Roher somewhat rephrases what he asked at the beginning.  What would Navalny’s message now be in the event of his being ‘killed or detained (my italics)’?  This time, the hero – that is the right word for him – is less dismissive.  Anticipating what he must be expecting to happen as soon as his plane touches down in Moscow, Navalny says, ‘Don’t do nothing.  …  If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong.  We need to utilise this power, to not give up, to remember we are a huge power that is being oppressed by these bad guys’.  Navalny premiered (and won prizes) at this year’s Sundance festival in January.  Well before the documentary’s mid-April release in British cinemas and television screening in the BBC’s Storyville’s slot, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine had enlarged the scale of his tyranny to an extent that might have threatened to reduce Navalny’s treatment at its hands to a seeming drop in the ocean.  On the other hand, Roher’s film might also have served as a timely reminder that the many voices with something to say about events in Ukraine could no longer include Navalny’s.  Yet he hasn’t, even behind bars, been silenced on social media.  He has called on Google and Meta to (quoting the Forbes piece) ‘use their ad-tech to do an end-run around Putin’s iron control’ on the Russian media.  He has tweeted regret for the killing by Russian soldiers in Ukraine of someone who shares his surname.  He encouraged French voters to support Emmanuel Macron in this month’s presidential election run-off.  As an inmate of ‘Penal Colony 2’ in Pokrov, east of Moscow, Alexei Navalny is still not doing nothing, and is no doubt still paying the price.

26 April 2022

[1] With Andy Meek on the Forbes website (https://www.forbes.com/)