‘Let’s make a thriller out of this movie,” suggests Alexei Navalny to his director, Daniel Roher. “And then, if I am killed, you can make a boring movie of memory.” It’s typical of the man: for someone in a situation of such precarity, Navalny seemingly struggles to take anything too seriously. It’s clearly a defence mechanism – and in the circumstances, who can blame him? The alternative might involve surrendering to despair, and that would help no one.
And anyway, Navalny has been living on the edge for long enough to be used to it. This startling, terrifying documentary (BBC Two) offers up a potted history of Navalny’s anti-Putin, pro-democracy activism. At times, he seems like a one-man opposition: equal parts politician, provocateur and investigative journalist. He’s not ideologically bound – in fact, there’s an interesting segment where Roher probes his brief, pragmatic-going-on-troubling alliance of convenience with the far right. But mainly, he’s portrayed in the mainstream Russian media as that most dreaded of things: a liberal.
