How did you become involved with this project?
Daniel Roher: In August of 2020, a man named Karl von Habsburg reached out to me offline and said, “I have this story I'm working on with a friend of mine, this guy who works at Bellingcat”—I had never heard of Bellingcat—“and we think it might be interesting, why don't you come to Vienna and we'll brief you on it?” I said, “What's it about?” He gave me a short pitch: Russian mercenaries, Ukrainian special forces, spies. I understood 10 percent of it but it seemed fascinating and Karl seemed like a serious operator. He runs a United Nations organization called Blue Shield, which is responsible for safeguarding art and culture in war zones and I’d been exploring the idea of doing a documentary on him with a producer named Odessa Rae. I thought, “Maybe this can manifest into something.”
I decided to go to Vienna at the height of Covid. There I met with Karl and his close friend and collaborator, a renowned Bulgarian journalist named Christo Grozev, who worked for Bellingcat. Bellingcat is run by digital nerds who sit around solving crimes using data. They leverage both open-source data—that is, information that is willingly published—and closed-source data, the stuff that you have to buy illicitly in corrupt economies. Christo and Karl briefed me on the Ukrainian story and a month later we all went to Kiev. Before we knew it, we were under investigation, all of our subjects fled and we had to leave the country. I felt like I was in my own little spy thriller. To say I was naive is a gross understatement. We went back to Vienna in a holding pattern. Christo said, “Biden will win the US election in a week and we'll have the political cover to go back to Kiev.” Lo and behold, Biden won. The next morning Christo says, “Listen, there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that I lost my passport and we can't go back to Kiev until I go to Bulgaria and get a new one.” I was so angry. But then he says, “But you know that Alexei Navalny guy? I might have a lead on who tried to poison him.”
As soon as he said the words, I saw the next year of my life. Christo is probably the only human on the planet who could have written to Alexei and said, “I have a lead on who tried to poison you” and Alexei would take it very seriously. Solving Russian poisoning cases was Christo's claim to fame. So he reached out to Alexei and a week later Odessa, Christo and I were sneaking across the Austria-Germany border, which was closed due to the pandemic, and we drove to this cinematic sleepy town called St. Blasien in the Black Forest and I met Alexei. I don't normally get star-struck, but I felt Alexei’s presence and energy in a very real way. He was disarming, his smile was warm, he was charming. We pitched him on a documentary project and why we had to be the ones to make it. He found us compelling enough to say, “Okay let's start.” Alexei—who's a master media manipulator and strategist—understood that if the story was this unfolding murder mystery, then we had to start right away. So we started filming immediately and over the next three-and-a-half months this film evolved into a very intimate portrait of one man, his family and his staff and what they are willing to sacrifice for the values they believe in—values I take for granted, like freedom of speech and democracy and human rights and living in a country where corruption is not the bedrock of how business is done. Right in front of me, I saw history unfold. It culminated with Alexei flying home to Russia on January 17, 2021. I was with him in his hotel room on the morning he left.
Before you met Navalny, what did you know of him?
DR: I knew he was the leader of the Russian opposition, I knew that Putin hated him, I knew that he was a media personality and very good at leveraging social media, and I knew that he had been poisoned. I remember listening to a podcast about his assassination attempt when I was painting my kitchen in Toronto and thinking, “Oh wow, poor guy, I hope he pulls through.” This was when he was still in a coma. Before I met him, the phrase that would come to mind about Navalny was “extraordinary courage.” You have to be really brave to poke this big bear over and over again and not be afraid of the consequences. Every Western journalist who's ever spoken to him asks, “Aren't you afraid that they're going kill you one day?” And clearly they tried to do just that. Between Christo mentioning him and me meeting him, I devoured every resource I could find. The Russian political context is very different from anything I'm familiar with but I understood what Navalny wanted, what his ambitions were. And I think he might have had a little more lenience for my ignorance because I'm not a Russian, I'm a Canadian.
What was the most telling thing about Navalny that you witnessed during the time that you were with him?
DR: I don't want to canonize him. But there were a few things I was really impressed by when I met him. There's this energy that is often attributed to talented politicians—Obama and Clinton are often described as having this energy—where they make you feel as if you are the most important person in the room. Navalny had that. I immediately felt myself drinking the Kool-Aid, thinking, "This guy could be president, I get it" and reminding myself to temper that with skepticism for the sake of the film. I was struck by his curiosity. Not too many people are interested in chatting with me about Canadian politics and the inner workings of a constitutional parliamentary democracy, but he was very engaged in that. He could debate circles around me in English. Also, he's so funny. He's hilarious. He could have a temper, he was tough on his staff but at the end of the day he was funny and charming.
His great genius is his media acumen, the way that he can bend a news cycle to his will and use the Internet to achieve his political objectives. I had to be mindful of that because it was clear that he was trying to manipulate me as we were making our film. The film opens with him telling me what the movie's going to be. He's sitting across from me talking, in a tongue-in-cheek way saying, "We're not going to make your boring political movie." I tried to infuse the film with that conflict. Above all, I was struck by the fact that while he's this giant global figure, he's also just some guy. He has a lovely wife. Really cool kids. He sits at home and plays Call of Duty with his son.
How would you place Navalny within Russia’s political scene?
DR: Russian politics is an enigma to me. It's complex and nebulous to experts let alone some schmo like me who made a rock-and-roll movie. I would frame Alexei now as the consciousness of the Russian opposition. He used to be the leader of the Russian opposition in so far as he was the last big guy standing. But now I frame him as the consciousness because he went back, because he's in prison. And what is the power of being a prisoner? I don't have the answer. What I understand about Alexei is that for him every moment holds the question of how to be strategic. It's clear that he and his team are the best. There's no one else in the country that has an organization like they do. I would say that in a very real way he is the moral center of the opposition, of a country that is very immoral. His family supports the mission that they are all on together. There are very few people on the planet who would be willing to make that level of sacrifice.
What about Navalny's own background politically?
DR: There's no analog to Western politics in Russia. Right and left do not mean the same thing in Russia that they do in the West. The most significant criticism of Navalny is that he’s allied himself with nationalists and appeared at nationalist rallies. When he was 25 or 26, he made a few YouTube videos that are, from my perspective, really inappropriate. They're basically done in this satirical sketch style that uses racist tropes to talk about issues such as migration from Central Asia and the Caucasus Mountains. I think at the time he made these videos to appeal to an unsavory base as part of his desire to build a broad coalition to defeat a dictator. He also spoke at nationalist rallies, though what he was saying at those rallies was not actually that controversial, he just said it in a way that was assertive and aggressive. It's important to note that he hasn't made videos like these or appeared at any nationalist rallies in a decade. He has distanced himself from some of nastier rhetoric. Although I don't condone everything he's done and all of the people he's had to speak to, I understand it’s a political calculation he made to build a wide coalition to defeat Putin.
What was the most astonishing moment in the film for you?
DR: When Alexei decided that he wanted to call up the men on the FSB team who were tasked with murdering him. I asked Christo the night before what his expectations were of this phone call, and he said something like, “It might be a nice set piece for the film but obviously no one's going to say anything. They're spies, they don't just say things over the phone, there's a protocol.” And we did these phone calls and one by one, each guy hung up on Alexei as we expected. I don't speak a word of Russian but you didn't have to speak any Russian to understand what was going on when they called the chemist, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, and they spoke to this man for forty-five to fifty minutes and he told the whole story. That was the most extraordinary part of the filming. It was terrifying and exciting: We just got this extraordinary scoop. The other moment that comes to mind is when Alexei went back. In forty-eight hours this guy that I had been sitting across from was the world's. Seeing hundreds of thousands of protestors take to the streets demanding his release, in the cold, in Russia in January.
What's your favorite moment in the film?
DR: In the last couple of frames of the movie, I ask Alexei if he has a message for the Russian people in the event that he is killed. When we filmed it, he gave me this really lame answer in English: "Don't give up." I asked him to do it again in Russian and he was annoyed because he wanted to leave, we had been going for quite a long time. But he did give me a more impassioned answer in Russian. That day I was interviewing him through Zoom, so he was looking at my face, and after he gave the answer, I gave him the thumbs up. And he's looking at me like, “Okay, can I go now?” It's the last thing we see onscreen. He smiles and trails off and we cut to black. I know that's a moment between he and I, and I feel very sad whenever I see it but it's one of my favorite parts. The shot when he's running in the snow means a great deal to me too. It's a stunning visual metaphor for a man who has made up his mind, who is on his course, who is resolute in his path and will not waver.
What do you think is going to happen to Navalny?
DR: I think he's going to be in prison for a very long time. Whether it's five years or ten or twenty I'm not sure. But I don't think he gets out until Putin dies and Putin is in fine shape. There's no incentive for them to release him. He mortally offended them several times and then he went back.
Why do you think he went back?
DR: He articulates that in the movie. He went back because he is a Russian politician who belongs in Russia and if he were to flee the country and be abroad then he would be relegated to another opposition figure who has fled. In Russia opposition figures are either scared into silence or shot outside of the Kremlin or flee the country. Alexei wanted to show his country that he would be the moral voice of decent Russians who believe in democracy and freedom and human rights. He would have been very ineffective if he’d stayed abroad and he understood that. I wonder, though, if he would have gone back so soon if he had known how assertive they were going to be in their crackdown on both him and his organizations.
So after he went back, you had all of this footage. What happened from there?
DR: I went back to Canada and started building a road map of what this film could be. It's extraordinarily difficult work taking thousands of pages and hundreds of hours and distilling it into ninety minutes. Creating the film was a slow, arduous process with no stone unturned. While that was happening, I was keeping an eye on the news as well. In April and May of 2021 Alexei went on a hunger strike and nearly died so I mobilized and flew to Vilnius because that's where Team Navalny is in exile. I wasn't sure if he would be alive when I landed. That was a very stressful trip but thankfully he survived and called off his hunger strike.
How did CNN get involved?
DR: Diane Becker, one of the producers, called up CNN and told them what we had. They were very keen. I didn't have to put together a pitch, I just got on the phone with them and told them what we were doing and they were very assertive about being involved. They understood this was a unique thing. To their credit, people get very freaked out when it comes to Russia and Putin and hacking. The CNN people had a lot of bravery. That's what Alexei demands and that's what we demanded. And they have been uncompromising from the very beginning.
What do you hope the audience will take from the film?
DR: I want audiences to be reminded that bad guys win if people stop caring and stop paying attention, whether it be authoritarians rising in Brazil, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, China, wherever. If we are inactive, that's when bad guys are able to come into power. We saw this in the United States in the 2016 election, which was a canary in the coal mine for the entire world. Alexei wants to remind us that we cannot be inactive. I want people to focus on that when they think about Alexei.
We are all aware now that there are so many different versions of reality all around us, and people are picking and choosing their versions of reality. So when you make a political documentary about a controversial figure, who you acknowledge is an astute manipulator of the media, how do you handle that?
DR: I was always mindful that we were making a film about a man who was trying to manipulate us. That is the meta narrative of the film. We have movie A about this man and his family and the investigation of an assassination attempt and his return to his homeland. And movie B is the story of a filmmaker trying to make a film about a politician who's trying to manipulate said filmmaker. We tried to infuse the film with movie B in the interview moments. I think all audiences have a responsibility to be incredibly skeptical, just as skeptical as I was. I went through my own experience of being totally smitten with this guy. But his team did not have any editorial control over this movie. And I don't think Alexei comes through as the patron saint of Russian politics. I think he comes through as a character we must support because despite his flaws, his mission is critical and there's a moral prerogative to support him. His courage should inspire the entire world.