'Navalny' documentary spotlights the Russian who dared to take on Putin

[Uncle Joe]

(snip)

Rather than offer a head-on summary of Navalny's career, the film centers on its most dramatic episode. In August 2020, Navalny is flying from Siberia back to Moscow — we see footage from the plane — when he suddenly becomes deathly ill.

The flight is diverted to Omsk, where he's taken to a hospital whose doctors are weirdly reluctant to let his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, see him. Fearing a murder attempt, she and his colleagues fight to get him flown to a hospital in Germany. There it's established that he'd been given a dose of Novichok, a deadly nerve gas known as Putin's signature poison.

Once he starts to recover, Navalny and his team try to figure out who had tried to kill him. They hook up with the investigative journalist Christo Grozev from the website Bellingcat, whom Navalny calls a "nice, very kind Bulgarian nerd with a laptop." Hacking into flight manifests and so forth, Grozev narrows down the possible killers, some of whom have been shadowing Navalny since 2017. In the film's most breathtaking moment — which I won't spoil — they get the smoking gun with the Kremlin's fingerprints on it.

(snip)

Late in the film, as he heads back to almost certain arrest in Russia, Navalny posts an inspiring video in which he declares that he's not afraid and he urges his supporters — and us — not to be afraid either. Now, he doesn't really expect that we will all be as flamboyantly brave as he is. Few are. Yet as Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his fellow Ukrainians are proving right now, it's possible for ordinary people to be terrified by the malevolence of a tyrant like Putin and still muster the courage to fight him.


https://www.npr.org/2022/04/21/1093712314/navalny-documentary-putin-russia-review

[SunSeeker]

1. I've got the DVR set to record it on April 24.

It's playing at 6 pm and then again at 8 pm here on the west coast.

Should be interesting.

[Rhiannon12866]

2. K&R, Important documentary!