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Exclusive: UTA has signed Bulgarian award-winning investigative journalist and author Christo Grozev as well as his IP holding company, M4 Studio, for representation in all areas.

Grozev is one of the world’s leading investigators of Russian clandestine operatives whose work was showcased in the Academy Award-winning documentary Navalny.

Currently, Grozev is working on a book that chronicles his major role in plotting the largest prisoner swap since the Cold War, which took place earlier this month. The result of more than two years of backroom negotiations and delicate geopolitical maneuvering, the 24-person, multi-country swap included Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and 15 others who had been held in Russia.

It was Grozev who had been able to identify and help secure the 2021 conviction of Russian assassin Vadim Krasikov. Grozev then pointed to Krasikov as the key to a successful prisoner trade that was to include the release of his friend and colleague,...

Leonid Volkov, the former chief of staff of late Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny, was attacked on Tuesday outside his house in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Navalny’s former press person and assistant Kira Yarmysh reported the attack on social media.

“Leonid Volkov has just been attacked near his home. They broke the window in his car and sprayed tear gas in his eyes, after which the attacker began to beat Leonid with a hammer. Now Leonid is at home, the police and an ambulance are on their way to him,” she wrote in a post on X.

A later post on the Team Navalny X handle showed a photo of Volkov being wheeled out of an ambulance.

Сейчас Леонид Волков в больнице

Фото от Ивана Жданова (https://t.co/qaoYuCGYlg) pic.twitter.com/4d0llz0ozK

— Команда Навального (@teamnavalny) March 12, 2024

Volkov, 43, served as Navalny’s chief of staff for his 2018 presidential...

Imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny learned Monday from his lawyer that a film detailing his poisoning and political activism won the Oscar for best documentary feature.

The 46-year-old politician was attending a court hearing via video link from the prison when his attorney broke the news to him about the documentary, “Navalny”, by director Daniel Roher, according to his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh. She called it “the most remarkable announcement of an (Oscar) win in history.”

Yarmysh did not report what Navalny’s initial reaction was to the Oscar win.

Read More: Oscars 2023 Complete List Of Winners: ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ Wins Big

According to Yarmysh, Navalny faced a court hearing in Kovrov, a town near the prison in the Vladimir region east of Moscow. President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critic participated in the hearing on a complaint he filed against Russian penitentiary officials.

At a daily conference call with reporters,...

Jimmy Kimmel hosts the live ABC telecast of the 95th Oscars® at the Dolby® Theatre at Ovation Hollywood on Sunday, March 12, 2023.

Contributed by Michelle Hannett and Gary Salem

The 95th Academy Awards were held Sunday evening at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.

Host Jimmy Kimmel presided over the ceremony, after the Navy Flyover and him parachuting inside the theater, as Oscar statuettes were awarded for all 23 categories. Two Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets flew down Hollywood Boulevard at an elevation of only 1,000 feet. The jets came from Naval Air Station Lemoore near Fresno. Inside the jets were two instructors, a squadron commander and a graduate form the Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program – known as “Top Gun.”

Fighter jets open the show during the live ABC Telecast of the 95th Oscars® at the Dolby® Theatre at Ovation Hollywood on Sunday, March 12, 2023. The 95th Oscars® at the Dolby® Theatre at Ovation Hollywood on Sunday,...

As Navalny won best documentary feature film at the 2023 Oscars, filmmaker Daniel Roher dedicated the award to the film’s namesake political prisoner and Putin critic while Navalny’s wife told her husband to “stay strong.”

After director Roher took to the Dolby Theatre stage with Alexei Navalny’s wife Yulia and his children Dasha and Zakhar on Sunday, he noted to the audience that the Russian opposition leader could not be present at the ceremony. (Navlany, a prominent critic of Vladimir Putin, has been imprisoned in Russia since March 2021 and has said he is in solitary confinement.) “I would like to dedicate this award to Navalny, to all political prisoners around the world,” said Roher in his speech. “Alexei, the world has not forgotten your vital message to us all. We cannot, we must not be afraid to oppose dictators and authoritarianism wherever it rears its head.”

Yulia Navalnaya...

Updated with statement from CNN Films from original 6:31 p.m. story: Imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny got a loving message from his wife from the Oscar stage after the film about him won Best Documentary Feature.

“Thank you to everybody here,” Yulia Navalnaya said when director Daniel Roher summoned her to the microphone after making his acceptance remarks. “My husband is in prison just for telling the truth. My husband is in prison just for defending democracy. Alexei, I’m dreaming of the day when you will be free and our country will be free. Stay strong.”

Related: Oscar Winners List

Roher’s documentary Navalny, from CNN Films, chronicles the poisoning plot that nearly took Alexei Navalny’s life. He was flying from Siberia to Moscow in August 2020 when he became deathly ill. Russian doctors who initially treated him claimed he was suffering from a metabolic disorder. But...

CNN has scored its first Oscars win: “Navalny,” the harrowing film following Russian dissident and former presidential candidate Alexei Navalny, took the prize for documentary feature film at Sunday’s Academy Awards.

The documentary, directed by Daniel Roher, gained new relevance after Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The CNN Films/Warner Bros. documentary is a fly-on-the-wall account of the rousing populist who was once a presidential candidate — and posed such a threat to Putin that Navalny was poisoned in a botched assassination plot ordered by the Kremlin in 2020. Navalny was detained in January 2021 and currently is serving a nine-year sentence in a Russian gulag. He has spent much of the sentence in solitary confinement.

Roher, in accepting the award, dedicated the Oscar win to Navalny and “to all political prisoners around the world”: “Alexei, the world has not forgotten your vital message to us all… We must...

Investigative journalist Christo Grozev, a key figure in the story of acclaimed documentary Navalny, says he and his family have been banned from attending the BAFTA ceremony on Sunday because he poses “a public security risk”.

Grozev, who is affiliated with the Netherlands-based investigative journalism group Bellingcat, was part of the team that uncovered the 2020 plot to kill Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny by poisoning.

The journalist tweeted yesterday that he has been banned from Sunday’s BAFTA ceremony where the film is nominated for Best Documentary.

“I was surprised to discover that my whole family and I have all been banned by British police from attending this weekend’s Bafta awards where the documentary #Navalny is nominated. The reason stated: we ‘represent a public security risk’,” he tweeted.

“I understand the need to keep the public safe (although I don’t understand how my son or teenage daughter constitute...

For nearly four months, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been in solitary confinement in what is being described as a “punishment’ cell two by three meters. Prisoners are supposed to be in that cell no more than 10 or 14 days. But he’s on a never-ending loop. As soon as he serves a 12-day sentence in solitary, he gets resentenced to another dozen days. He’s allowed to read one book per sentence. And for 30 minutes a day, Navalny gets paper and a pen to respond to his letters he has received.

“Every time, every couple of days they come up with new violations of prison rules that Alexei commits, and they become the reasons for keeping him in the solitary confinement indefinitely with his charges are very much obviously trumped up,’ said Maria Pevchikh, the executive producer of the acclaimed, Oscar-nominated feature documentary “Navalny.”

“They have to do with prison protocol,...

The award-winning documentary Navalny could be crowned with an Oscar nomination later this month, but the man whose story is told in it has never seen the film. Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, remains behind bars under a lengthy sentence after daring to criticize President Vladimir Putin.

“For me, that’s a very bitter part of this,” director Daniel Roher tells Deadline. “It’s very sad that he hasn’t gotten to see the film. One thing I always think of with Navalny is how enthusiastic he was about being a film subject. He’s a very curious man and he’s very, very curious about the filmmaking process… I certainly hope I’ll get to show it to him one day.”

The documentary from CNN Films unfolds like a political thriller, investigating the poisoning plot in August 2020 that nearly cost Navalny his life.

The charismatic politician gained a...

In a bonus clip from “Carpool Karaoke: The Series,” longtime friends Lea Michele and Darren Criss drive through New York City singing holiday songs, including one of Criss’ own from “A Very Darren Crissmas.”

Earlier this month, new episodes of the series premiered on Apple TV+, featuring Sandra Oh and Duran Duran, Nikki Glaser and Wilco, Kevin and Michael Bacon (also known as The Bacon Brothers), Method Man and Chris Redd, the cast of Apple TV+’s “For All Mankind,” Ciara and Russel Wilson and Hillary and Chelsea Clinton along with Amber Ruffin.

“Carpool Karaoke: The Series” is produced for Apple by CBS Studios and Fulwell 73 Productions with executive producers James Corden, Eric Pankowski and Ben Winston.

Check out the clip below.

In other television news today:

Dates

Revolt has launched its first-ever investigative special, “The Real Thirst Trap,” covering Black communities across America battling systematic water pollution. The show premiered Dec.

A version of this interview with “Navalny” director Daniel Roher first appeared in the Guilds & Critics Awards / Documentaries issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.

In “Navalny,” director Daniel Roher follows the charismatic Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny as he convalesces in Germany after being poisoned in 2020 with a Soviet-era nerve agent. Unfolding like a thriller, the HBO Max film traces how Navalny — who shares his anti-authoritarian message almost entirely via social media — and a team of investigators discover who was behind the murder attempt.

The documentary also explores why Navalny was determined to return to Russia in 2021, where he was immediately arrested. He is now serving a nine-year sentence in a maximum security penal colony notorious for prisoner abuse. We sat down with Roher to discuss the making of the film.

Alexei Navalny is a talented, extremely media savvy politician, which presents certain challenges to you as a filmmaker. In the opening scene,...

Navalny has been marketed as an international thriller focusing on the conspiracy to assassinate Russian peace activist Alexander Navalny, but director Daniel Roher says that it was just as important to show him as a human being as it was an icon.

At Deadline’s Contenders Documentary awards-season panel, Roher shared why it was important to include Navalny’s personal life in the film.

Related: The Contenders Documentary – Deadline’s Full Coverage

“By showing his humanity, his family, we were able to illustrate exactly what was at stake for him, and exactly what he was sacrificing for the cause of Russian democracy and the freedom of Russia,” he said. “And that’s why it was paramount to not just have this film be a political film, or not just have this film be the murder mystery, but to really, at its heart, make a film about a family man, make...

Deadline’s Contenders Film: Documentary awards-season event kicks off Sunday at 8 a.m. Pt and promises to open up distant lands and even a distant planet—no passport required.

Click her to register for and watch today’s Contenders livestream.

The terrain covered by the cast and creatives from our 20 participating films astonishes with its variety and range: an enclave of Delhi, India in All That Breathes, a remote section of Paraguay in Eami, and possibly an even more remote outpost of the Brazilian rainforest in Wildcat. Moscow is the ultimate destination of Navalny, the documentary about Russia’s imprisoned and poisoned opposition leader, and Descendant takes us to a neighborhood of Mobile, Alabama settled by survivors of the last slave ship known to have navigated U.S. waters.

About 5,600 miles separate Moscow from Mobile, mere inches apart compared to the far-flung rendezvous point of Good Night Oppy, about NASA...

A superyacht believed to be owned by Russian president Vladimir Putin was “frozen” by Italian authorities Friday before the ship could set sail from port.

The 700 million, 459-foot Scheherazade, worth approximately 700 million, had been under investigation since March, when Italian authorities boarded the ship as part of the European Union’s sanctions against Russian oligarchs in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

While Scheherazade’s ownership was under question, anti-corruption journalists working with jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny long claimed that the ship belonged to Putin; U.S. officials...

London-based documentary specialist Dogwoof has closed a host of sales for Daniel Roher’s “Navalny” and Jono McLeod’s “My Old School,” both of which premiered at Sundance and are screening this week at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.

Roher’s riveting documentary thriller (pictured above) won the Festival Favorite Award and the U.S. Documentary Audience Award at Sundance. It follows the Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, as he and investigative news organizations Bellingcat and CNN try to unravel the botched effort to assassinate him in 2020.

Following CNN’s world premiere broadcast on April 24, TV rights were sold to BBC (U.K.), Rtl (Germany), Discovery (Italy), Svt (Sweden), Dr (Denmark), Nrk (Norway), Ruv (Iceland), Vrt (Belgium), Vpro (the Netherlands), Channel 8 (Israel), Yesdocu (Israel), Tvn (Poland), and Aleph (Romania).

The film was released theatrically last month by Warner Bros. Studios and Fathom Events in...