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Depending on your awareness of international politics – mine is admittedly low – you may already know the whole story. The revelations here, including the prank call, have been well-publicized by global media and by Navalny himself since December 2020 (a natural handler of social media, Navalny is very cognizant of his views and likes on YouTube and even TikTok, one of the more intriguing characteristics Roher manages to capture). The comparison to a Hollywood plot is apt one scene in which Navalny prank calls his would-be assassins and tricks one to reveal the details of the plot – how they laced his blue underwear with poison, how they cleaned up evidence – left my jaw on the floor.
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These sit-downs provide some personal color to the more procedural scenes of a celebrity dissident at work, but don’t include anything we can’t infer from observing the war room, so to speak. The film features several one-on-ones with Navalny’s inner circle, including Grozev, Pevchikh, Yulia (steely, undaunted, enjoys chess), and his 19-year-old, American-accented daughter Daria, a university student in California. (Navalny had been kept in a Russian hospital against his wife Yulia’s wishes immediately following the poisoning, then transferred to a hospital in Germany, where he recuperated for months). The brazenness of the plot is so galling it’s almost brilliant – “even reasonable people are like what? Come on, poison?” Navalny tells Roher in his one interview before he returns to Russia. Some allege that novichok is Putin’s preferred assassination method, equivalent to “leaving his signature on the crime scene”, says Navalny’s chief of staff in a sit-down interview. (novichok gained notoriety in 2018, when two Russian intelligence officers poisoned former GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in exile in Salisbury, England both survived, and the incident caused an international firestorm.) (I am obligated to write that the Russian government denies involvement.) Christo Grozev, a Bulgarian investigative journalist from the group Bellingcat, and Maria Pevchikh, the head investigator for Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, uncover a plot pulled straight from the movies (there’s even symbolic pinned photos on a map webbed with red yarn, which Roher films tenderly): doughy, dopey agents who followed Navalny for three years and poisoned him on a filming trip to Siberia with the nerve agent novichok, a poison which essentially shuts down the body and then dissipates, making death appear to be from natural causes. Those findings are indeed shocking, in both the effort put forth by a team of Kremlin and the sheer stupidity with which they went about capping a years-long plot to kill Navalny. The bulk of the film, produced by CNN Films and HBO Max with a surprise Sundance premiere this week, is embedded with Navalny and his close team in their Black Forest hideout during the second half of 2020, as they unravel the assassination plot against him and prepare to go public with explosive findings. Navalny, a 98-minute documentary from Canadian director Daniel Roher, details in cogent, stressful, riveting fashion just how scared the Kremlin is of Navalny, arguably the biggest threat to Vladimir Putin’s power at home.