Enthralling and intimate, director Daniel Roher’s NAVALNY unfolds with the pace of a thriller as it follows Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in his quest to identify the men who poisoned him in August 2020. Filmed in Germany as the story unfolded and offering extraordinary access to the investigation, NAVALNY is a fly-on-the-wall documentary that is also a study of Navalny the man – a portrait of a leader intent on reform who will not be cowed by anything, including his own poisoning.

In August 2020 a plane travelling from Siberia to Moscow diverted to Omsk when a passenger on board became deathly ill. That passenger was Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critic – Alexei Navalny, the leader of Russia’s opposition, a man many had long feared would be killed for his refusal to be silent. Navalny’s wife and colleagues, convinced that Navalny had been poisoned and terrified of what might happen to him in a Siberian hospital, raced to Omsk and fought to evacuate him to Germany. There, German authorities confirmed that Navalny had been dosed with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok.

But how was Navalny poisoned? And by whom? These questions are at the core of NAVALNY.

Rating

M

Duration

98 MINS