The Hill, the congressional newspaper does not usually run stories about Oscar movie awards, This year was the exception. The documentary film, Navalny, won the award for best feature length documentary. Alexey Navalny leads the Russia of the Future Party and is a member of the opposition coordination council.
Directed by Daniel Roher, the film detailed the 2020 assassination attempt on Navalny and the alleged connection to the Kremlin. Navalny has been imprisoned by the Russian government since 2021.
“There’s one person who couldn’t be with us here tonight,” Roher said as he accepted the Oscar at the ceremony in Los Angeles.
“Alexei Navalny, the leader of the Russian opposition, remains in solitary confinement for what he calls — I want to make sure we get his words exactly right — ‘Vladimir Putin’s unjust war of aggression in Ukraine,’” Roher said.
“I would like to dedicate this award to Navalny, to all political prisoners around the world. Alexey, the world has not forgotten your vital message to us all. We cannot, we must not be afraid to oppose dictators and authoritarianism wherever rears its head,” Roher said.
CNN Films, part of the eponymous news network, produced the film.
Political films about opposition politics are comparatively rare. The dramatic difficulty lies in not churning out a hagiography. A recent and comparable film is Darkest Hour (2017) with Gary Oldnan portraying Winston Churchill as the leader of the opposition in 1939 within his own party!