Director Daniel Roher’s film ‘Navalny’ won the Best Documentary Feature Film award at the Oscars 2023.
According to Variety, a US-based news outlet, 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. At the 95th Academy Awards, ‘Navalny’ beat four other nominees in the documentary feature film category, Shaunak Sen’s ‘All That Breathes,’ about two brothers who run a bird hospital in Delhi; Laura Poitras’ ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,’ about photographer and activist Nan Goldin and her campaign to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid epidemic; Sara Dosa’s ‘Fire of Love,’ following two French volcanologists; and Simon Lereng Wilmont’s “A House Made of Splinters,” about three children awaiting their fate in a temporary shelter in war-torn Eastern Ukraine.
The film had its world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the audience award in the U.S. documentary competition and the fan-selected Festival Favorite Award, Variety reported.
