Posted at 12:00 a.m.
The Sundance Film Festival broadcast a shocking documentary on Tuesday evening about the case of Alexei Navalny, the main opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin who survived a poisoning ordered by the Kremlin. Signed by Torontonian Daniel Roher, the film sparked an avalanche of reactions.
Built like a thriller, with striking images and music to match, the documentary simply titled Navalny was produced in the wake of a meeting between Mr. Roher and the investigative journalist Christo Grozev, of the media Bellingcat, with Mr. Navalny in a village in the Black Forest, Germany. The latter rested there for months in 2020, following his poisoning with Novichok, a nerve agent.
Journalist and activist Maria Pevchikh, a close friend of Navalny who was with him at the time of his poisoning, also joined the film crew.
The group met with Navalny’s family as well as members of his immediate entourage. They then followed them until the day the 45-year-old lawyer returned to Moscow, at the end of January 2021. He was greeted there by a crowd of cheering supporters before being arrested by the authorities. Currently, he is still imprisoned.
The most surreal moment of the film comes when Christo Grozev, thanks to a mind-blowing search in the underground web (dark web), managed to discover the identities of several Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agents who had followed Navalny during a trip to Tomsk, Siberia, where he was poisoned on August 20, 2020.
IMAGE FROM TWITTER
At the time Navalny and Konstantin Kudryavtsev’s call aired, Bellingcat’s Twitter account posted this message. Hours later, millions of people had seen the video of the call.
Grozev finds the phone numbers of all these “suspects” and the group orchestrates an incredible trap where Navalny calls the alleged perpetrators himself, posing as the boss of the plan. One of them, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, a military chemist by profession, falls into the trap and reveals absolutely all the details under the bewildered gaze of Navalny, Grozev, Pevchikh and company.
Some of these images were seen all over the world at the time of their broadcast, on December 21, 2020. But here, the integral editing allows you to live every moment of it. Thus, the fooled and somewhat bewildered chemist explains that poison was poured into the crotch of Navalny’s underwear.
The latter fell seriously ill on a plane returning from Tomsk to Moscow. He owes his life to the pilots who made an emergency landing and to the medical team on the ground.
Appalled, the chemist Kudryavtsev can only recognize that the doctors gave the right antidotes to the militant.
At the end of the film, when asked what message he wants to leave the Russians if he doesn’t survive, Navalny says, “Don’t give up. You can not do this. If they decide to kill me, it means we are incredibly strong and we have to use this power. »
“A grotesque injustice”
During a question-and-answer session that Sundance CEO Tabitha Jackson herself moderated, Daniel Roher strongly denounced the Russian regime in place.
“My wish is that every human being on this planet knows the name of Alexei Navalny and that this name is associated with a grotesque injustice perpetrated by the Russian state against this survivor of an attempted murder who was arrested because he is just alive,” he said.
I want a collective cry of rage and I want us to stop doing business with the Russians.
Daniel Roher, director of Navalny
Following its broadcast on Tuesday evening, the magazine variety called the work “a must-see documentary” about the man who became the “conscience of Russia”. “If Tom Clancy or John Le Carré had written the events depicted in this documentary, you would have thought it unreal,” writes The Hollywood Reporter. “Like its subject, this striking work is part of the immediate”, enthuses The Screen Daily. “That Putin is portrayed as a cruel autocrat who will do anything to get his way is especially timely as he threatens to invade Ukraine,” notes The Daily Beast.
The existence of this documentary was first revealed on January 13, 2022 by a joint press release from CNN and HBO MAX, which owns the distribution rights. On Monday, Sundance announced its world premiere in the competitive documentary section. There’s every reason to believe it will air on CNN and HBO one day.
As for the chemist Konstantin Kudryavtsev, the film crew was never able to talk to him again…