‘Navalny’ Director Hopes His Oscar-Nominated Doc Dissuades Putin From Murdering Its Subject

thewrap.com:

“Navalny,” the documentary feature telling the story of activist, journalist and Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny after he was poisoned with a nerve agent in an August 2020 assassination attempt and lived to tell the tale, has been making waves since it’s award-winning Sundance premiere in January 2022.

Now it’s nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, as well as both the Producers and Directors Guild Award for achievement in documentary filmmaking.

But in a recent Q&A with TheWrap Editor-in-Chief Sharon Waxman, the film’s director, Daniel Roher, indicated that beyond Navalny’s recovery from a coma and near-death hospital stay, he’s currently enduring an even harder road while behind bars at a maximum security penal colony in Russia.Speaking to the charges that Navalny violated his parole for a suspended prison sentence he had received for alleged fraud in 2014 (a charge that Navalny has characterized as political prosecution), Roher said that “the reason he missed his parole appointment was because he was in Germany recovering from a state sponsored poisoning attack.” “The Kafka-esque absurdity of that is very much threaded into the Russian judicial system,” he said. “So he has been in prison ever since.”In his chat with Waxman, Roher indicated the levels of torture Navalny is subjected to rivals that of U.S.

involvement with Guantanamo Bay detainees post-9/11, detailing how fellow prisoners will be utilized as “biological agents.”“They’ll bring in someone who has tuberculosis or COVID to spend 12 hours in the cell with him.