Navalny

This would be a very entertaining farce, if it were fictional but it isn't. It's reality and the Russian leader and the Russian media are simply that dumb.

Navalny is a very bright, very savvy person who seems willing to do whatever it takes, including dying, to see regime change in Russia.

I haven't seen a more remarkable person or movie in a very long time.

A must see.

This film has been downvoted by Russian bots. Which is one of the points of this film to begin with. Roher befriended Navalny by chance. Navalny is a shrewed social media adept politician. Roher says he was not sure if Navalny is using him in this documentary. Even that is woven in. Need to see it.

Incredible documentary on the corruption in Russia. Without technology and social media, these corrupt people would continue to suppress the freedom of people. No way as I write this, 9.7k people have seen this and rated it aa average 5. You can purchase Mass ratings on here I've seen it. They are scared.

I knew before I watched this BBC Storyville documentary that I would be moved to both anger and admiration. I can't think of how any right-minded individual couldn't admire the courage of Russian dissident politician Alexei Navalny in his futile attempt to not only speak truth to power but indeed to unseat that dictatorial power in the country of his birth which he clearly loves. The other side of the coin of course is the rage one feels as we see him crushed under the heel of the tyrant Putin by being arrested the second he sets foot again in Moscow and of course we now know that he has subsequently been brutally murdered earlier this year in his Siberian jail almost certainly under executive orders.

This moving documentary doesn't shed a lot of background on Navalny's previous history, rather it drops us right into the action as we see him and his team attempt to bolster their grass-roots support against Putin amongst the Russian public, an almost impossible task given that Putin controls almost every media outlet in the country. The one place where Navalny can get his message out is of course on the internet where he achieves one spectacular success as we see later in the film.

This fly-on-the-wall film offers the viewer intimate access to Navalny, his family and his back-up team and it's obvious that they all offer him their unconditional support. His wife Yulia in particular has a similarly fearless outlook as she stands right by his side in all his endeavours.

The crisis point reached in the film is when he is poisoned by the Russian dirty-tricks brigade following orders no doubt from the very top and barely survives. Welcomed into Germany by their then Chancellor Angela Merkel, he's treated well there and remarkably makes a full recovery before he embarks on the task of exposing the plot which he does with a brilliant sting on one of the perpetrators who no doubt is now doing hard labour in Siberia for being so easily duped.

We see just how piecemeal and rudimentary Navalny's whole operation is, built as it is on a small team of fellow-believers and done with the minimum of resources. We also witness the strong family bonds which subsisted between himself, his wife and their two almost grown children. Throughout Navalny comes over as a completely natural person but also as a driven individual even as he acknowledges that in resisting as he does, he is almost certainly signing his own death warrant, as indeed proved to be the case. It's important however to observe that the documentary isn't completely adulatory as he's asked direct questions about links with the far right where he perhaps betrays some political naivety.

Nevertheless, it makes the blood boil to see him bravely or foolishly, depending on your point of view, return to Moscow where he's inevitably arrested even though there's a large crowd of supporters waiting for him at the airport, who themselves we see brutally dispersed by the police.

The film ends with Navalny requoting the famous phrase attributed to Edmund Burke that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing and certainly in his sadly truncated life, Navalny could not and did not stand idly by and do nothing. One can only hope that in time we will be rid of the numerous despots around the world today ruling their manipulated and brainwashed populations by dictat. To do so, as Navalny recognised, we will need more fearless, principled individuals like him to stand up and be counted and hopefully this film will inspire them to pick up the torch even if it means putting their own lives in peril.

At the time of writing, the average rating is a little over 5, from over 10,000 ratings. Yet all but one of the written reviews rates it 9 or more. Bizarre no? Or does someone really want this film to rate badly for political reasons? That alone should make you want to see it.

Navalny is a remarkably brave, perhaps slightly arrogant man and his story is frightening and quite incredible. He and his team are very media savvy and at times the production feels almost too slick. Can we believe everything we see in the film? I feel it would be naive to do so given how all sides tend to manipulate mainstream media to their own ends.

My biggest concern is that the crux of the film is one telephone conversation. The problem is, we have absolutely no way of verifying the identity of the voice on the phone or if there is any truth to the conversation. The documentary brushes over this point, focusing instead on the content of the conversation, which is understandable given the sensational revelations made in it. So should we as the audience just believe it and move on or question it as well as everything else the producers want us to questions? I don't know.

Overall, well worth watching.