Hot Docs 2022: Navalny

Daniel Roher’s Navalny contains an early candidate for scene of the year. In the scene, Russian political dissident, Alexei Navalny, sits at a table covered with laptops and cables alongside journalist Christo Grozev of Bellingcat and his media director. Navalny is currently in Germany for rehabilitation after having been poisoned with nerve agent Novichok on a flight from Novosibirsk to Moscow. He’s back on his feet and Grozev has figured out the identities of the FSB agents that poisoned him. Now, with the aid of a burner phone and some mirroring programs, Navalny is getting ready to call the men who tried to kill him. 

One by one he calls them. Most hang up almost immediately, if they answer the call at all. But one chemist answers, and Navalny, pretending to be a bureaucrat doing a performance review for the botched assassination attempt, asks him to explain why they weren’t successful. Shockingly, the chemist takes the bait and starts to describe, albeit hesitantly, how they poisoned Navalny and why he thinks Navalny survived. It’s a shocking, exhilarating sequence, the kind of scene that would be thrilling in a fictional thriller, let alone a documentary about one of the most famous political dissidents in the world. It’s almost too good to be real, which is partly what makes it so exciting.

However, some people do think the scene is fake, that Navalny is merely a CIA asset and a tool for undermining Russian national power in favour of Western rivals. Russian President Vladimir Putin is one such person. Although he refuses to ever say Navalny’s name in public, as shown in the film’s archival footage, he’s fixated on Navalny as a possible political rival, which is why he has Navalny constantly followed and why he attempted to kill him in such extravagant fashion in August 2020. In the wake of his surviving the assassination attempt, Navalny became a beloved figure in the West. Thus, Daniel Roher’s film comes at the right moment, offering a portrait of Navalny as a political icon right when international eyes are fixed on the Russian state as an enemy. Using Nalvany’s poisoning, recovery, and investigation of his would-be assassins as the central dramatic arc, Navalny seeks to show the pressures of living in such a dangerous spotlight as Navalny does. It offers a portrait of Navalny as a man defined by his role as resistor to Vladimir Putin, and one who understands how his power grows the more the Kremlin attempts to stop him.

This doesn’t mean Roher’s film is hagiography. It’s hard not to admire Navalny’s perseverance in light of what he's been through. The film patiently depicts the arduous process of trying to grow a dissident political movement in Russia as well as the individual struggles of Navalny in his recovery from poisoning, and then his eventual return to Russia, despite knowing that prison waits for him when he lands. And there’s likely been no moment in the 21st century where the Russian state is more universally despised than at this very moment, when Russia wages a needless war in Ukraine. But the Navalny we see in Roher’s film is not presented entirely as a leader of nearly mythic stature. He’s charismatic and funny and has the capacity to make those he’s speaking to think he’s fascinated by their lives, and always has been. But he’s also always “on,” putting on a show for the cameras while being slippery when it comes to expressing concrete political beliefs and aspirations.

Roher has explained in interviews that he knows that Navalny only agreed to have the film made so he could use it as a political tool. Thus, the candid moments in the film are political tools to drum up sympathy in the West and put more political pressure on the Kremlin. This isn’t to say that Roher resists Navalny using the film to build up his mythic political profile. For instance, there’s a short sequence in the small German village where Navalny is recuperating alongside his wife that follows them on a morning walk. They stop by a fenced-in yard with a donkey and a miniature horse and tenderly feed the animals with carrots. The scene is calculated to portray Navalny as a man in touch with the simple pleasures of life. Roher even returns to this village late in the film after Navalny has returned to Russia, where he’s arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison. In this moment, we see Navalny’s wife, Yulia, and their children feed the donkey and horse in Alexei’s absence, showing that they will continue to live and enjoy life, even if Alexei cannot.

It seems that Roher is often happy to oblige Navalny’s myth-making, but only to a point. It’s clear the film’s sympathies are with Navalny; it’d be absurd if they weren’t. But Roher is also careful to let us in on Navalny’s performative approach to the film. For instance, we see snippets of Navalny the glad handing politician, as he tries to smooth over his frustration after telling Roher off, or as Nalvany the showman, practicing jokes and bits on his kids or campaign members before he films them for his TikTok followers. During a key interview with Roher, we watch Navalny give a perfunctory answer to his associating with Russian nationalist movements in the early 2010s, and then continue watching the “off-the-record” exchange between him and his media director where they chat about the appropriateness of Roher’s questions in Russian, all while Roher’s camera quietly records the whole conversation.

At no point is Roher attempting to play a bait-and-switch with Navalny, giving him cinematic room in the hopes that he’ll expose himself as a fraud, but he also doesn’t align his documentary’s purpose fully with Navalny’s agenda nor make his film a mere megaphone for his subject. It’s hard to maintain such control with a figure as dynamic as Navalny. He’s an entertaining, fascinating man with an outrageous life story, and when you have such fabulous material for your documentary’s focus, it’s tempting to relinquish all control, knowing that the result will be a rollicking bit of entertainment. But by letting us see glimpses behind the curtain, Roher manages to make his film more than just entertainment; it becomes an authentic portrait of political myth-making, and not just a tool of myth-making itself.

As the sequence with the phone call to his assassins shows, Navalny is very talented at political theatre. He’s entertaining. He’s charming. He’s mordant. He knows how to put on a show. But there’s a limit to his charms; YouTube views and TikTok likes only go so far in a political world where real power can assassinate enemies and invade neighbouring countries. For Navalny to be more than a symbol and an icon of Russian dissidence, to become a leader with institutional power, he’ll have to translate charm into support, likes into votes, an online following into a real-life movement. Perhaps he’s up to that challenge. Perhaps not and his story ends in a penal colony. But even if it does, he’s put on a hell of a show.

8 out of 10

Navalny (2022, USA)

Directed by Daniel Roher.

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