Alexei Navalny says it coolly, with a touch of mockery: ‘I thought: the more popular I get, the harder it becomes for them to kill me.’
oh boy, you were wrong, responds Canadian filmmaker and interviewer Daniel Roher, who followed the Kremlin critic closely for a long time. He has been doing this since the 45-year-old Russian woke up from his coma in hospital after being poisoned with the nerve agent novichok in 2020.
The documentary Navalny had its world premiere at the American Sundance festival at the end of January and is the opening film of the Movies That Matter festival this Friday.
Roher, known for his The Band portrait Once Were Brothers (2019), got access to the private recordings of Navalny and his family. The director follows the opposition leader’s recovery until his return to (and arrest in) Russia. His documentary also follows how the research collective Bellingcat unravels the perpetrator’s trail, which unmistakably leads to the Russian authorities. The masterpiece is the videotaped phone call, in which Navalny calls the secret agents who tried to kill him, posing as a government official. And so gets to hear exactly how the Russian FSB took him: nerve poison applied in his underpants.
Even though many facts are in Navalny already known, lined up and packaged as a thriller-like narrative, they provide a mind-boggling historical document. Virtually everyone underestimated the murderousness of Putin’s regime, including Navalny. The current derailment of Russia in Ukraine adds to the oppression: recently made documentaries about Russian society, politics and repression are suddenly shown (or revised) as a path to war.
trenches
Movies that Matter, the festival for films that in one way or another revolve around human rights, selected various films about (and from) Russia and Ukraine. Like the black and white documentary Trenches, about the (then) stranded trench battle between the Ukrainian soldiers and the Russian separatists in the Donbass region. And also fiction films, such as the one co-financed by the Russian Ministry of Culture Captain Volkonogov Escapedabout the insane purges under Stalin, who did not spare his own security service either.
Alexei Navalny also repeatedly appears in the documentary F@ck this Job by Vera Krichevskaya. She follows the rise and (almost) fall of the Russian independent television station Dozhd, for which she worked for some time. Starting out as an optimistic lifestyle channel, with owner, banker wife and society queen Natasha Sindeeva as its shining centerpiece, Dozhd gradually takes on a more critical and journalistic profile. Navalny is welcome there with his self-made investigative films, in which the then opposition leader and lawyer explains the shameless enrichment of President Putin and his associates.
As state broadcasters comply with the imposed censorship and broadcast propaganda and Russia becomes less and less free after Putin’s third inauguration, Dozhd is fighting the new anti-LGBTQ laws. If the combative Sindeeva, who moves in a pink Porsche, also decides to report factually about the uprisings in Ukraine and the downing of flight MH17, the station is banned from the cable. Just like in Navalny are in F@ck this Job moments recorded from Putin’s press conferences, in which he discusses the persecution of his opponents. The disdain of the Russian president is horrifying to watch.
The fact that Krichevskaya also wants to show her dissatisfaction with Dozhd’s earlier, not yet critical course, makes her documentary a bit messy. But F@ck this Job offers a fascinating look at the dramatic transition in recent Russian history: from the champagne-filled ‘free years’ when the economy suddenly turned ‘on steroids’, to the violent police state of today.
Movies that Matter, various locations in The Hague, April 8-16. Several films are also shown in cinemas elsewhere in the country.