CWC Global: Navalny

Winner of the 2023 Academy Award for Best Documentary, director Daniel Roher’s Navalny follows late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in his quest to identify the men who poisoned him in August 2020. Shot in Germany as the story unfolded, the film has the pace of a thriller and offers extraordinary access to the investigation. Navalny is a fly-on-the-wall documentary that is also a study of Navalny the man—a portrait of a leader intent on reform who would not be cowed by anything, including his own poisoning, and who chose to return to Russia despite the continued danger he faced. The film and Navalny’s message to the Russian people has renewed significance and resonance after his death in an Arctic prison camp in February.

Director Daniel Roher will join moderator Sasha Razor (Film and Media Studies and Germanic and Slavic Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of Roher’s film and the legacy of Alexei Navalny.