In a scene from the 2022 documentary “Navalny,” Russian dissident Alexei Navalny’s oldest daughter, Dasha, recalls that when she was 13, she began thinking about her father dying. As she speaks, she apologizes for getting teary. She was 19 at the time of the on-camera interview and had been living far too long with the sense that her father’s anti-corruption work made him a target of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.
Amid international responses to news of Navalny’s death on Feb.16 at an Arctic penal colony, it’s easy to forget that in addition to international expressions of outrage and despair, there is an intimate group of people for whom the grief is deeply palpable. Joining his family and colleagues at Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (many of them exiles), that circle includes the filmmakers behind the riveting, Oscar-winning documentary.
“A lot of my mind space and heart space has been engulfed by this over the last few days, certainly,” said Shane Boris, one of the producers of Daniel Roher’s Oscar-winning documentary and a Littleton native.
“I’ve been with Daniel and one of our producers, Diane [Becker]. And I just saw Dasha a few weeks ago,” he said. “So, yeah, the family and their fight are certainly part of my life and the life of the film team.”
“Navalny” is currently available for streaming on Max. And the Anti-Corruption Foundation-produced doc “A Palace for Putin: The Story of the Biggest Bribe” — about the construction of a massive residence for the dictator on the Black Sea — is available on YouTube.
Because “Navalny” offers a portrait of a singular, appealing figure, a viewer might miss the ways in which the movie makes plain that anti-corruption work cannot succeed if it hinges on one person, even one as magnetic as Navalny. The arrival of data journalist Christo Grozev of the open-source, online network Bellingcat makes this point. He provides evidence pointing to a Kremlin-backed unit of assassins as responsible for the poisoning of Navalny during a 2020 trip to Tomsk, Siberia.
With its twists and turns, “Navalny” becomes not just a portrait of a leader but also a political thriller. No spoilers here, but the film’s zenith proves both gripping and surprisingly amusing. On screen, Navalny is a vibrant, uncowed figure — which makes it even harder to reconcile the man in the documentary with the cold fact of his presumptive murder. (Russian authorities are not releasing his body for two weeks, so determining the cause of death is unlikely.)
Yulia Navalnaya’s vociferous calls to continue the anti-corruption work of her husband suggest there is no rest for the grieving in the face of authoritarianism.
Being imprisoned, said Boris, didn’t preclude Navalny — who was arrested when he returned from Germany to Russia in 2021— from continuing to grow politicly and intellectually. “It was so encouraging for me to see while he was in prison, that he started to take every opportunity to speak out against the war in Ukraine and to talk about greater egalitarian measures of Russia, like health care for more people. Some of these things that were clearly [in step] with the kind of care for the Russian people and a politics that was more than the opposition of Putin, which animated so much of his fight,” he said.
“I think the world’s lost an important voice against corruption, against totalitarianism, and for democratic values,” he said. But Boris cautioned against complacency. “Even though that voice is lost, I think so much of what his message is and what he stands for continues.”
Asked how viewers might watch the film given Navalny’s death, Boris — much like Yulia Navalnaya (and Navalny himself) — looks beyond his assassination. “I haven’t watched it again, but [his death] certainly changes how we watch it. But I hope it doesn’t change — and I trust that it doesn’t change — our sort of fortitude and personal investment in doing what we can to stand up for those who would challenge and take away everything that we care about, both in Russia and, of course, factions and elements in our own country that are hostile to democracy.”
