Navalny is in solitary confinement but did get word of Oscar win, says director Daniel Roher
Imprisoned Putin critic holds onto hope of being reunited with family, says director
Update, Feb. 16, 2024: Alexei Navalny died after feeling unwell and losing consciousness Friday, Russian prison services said in a statement. The jailed Russian opposition leader was 47. Read more.
Original story below, published on April 6, 2023.
Accepting the Oscar for best documentary last month, Canadian director Daniel Roher says it meant a lot for him to share the stage with Yulia Navalnaya, wife of prominent Putin critic Alexei Navalny.
Roher's winning documentary Navalny focuses on the opposition leader, who survived a poisoning attempt in 2020 and was subsequently imprisoned on his return to Russia.
Yulia closed out the acceptance speech with a message to her husband: "Alexei, I am dreaming [of] the day when you will be free, and our country will be free. Stay strong my love."
Backstage, she and Roher hugged, and the director broke down.
"I immediately start crying … all the feelings, all the emotion of the whole moment come out," Roher, who was raised in Toronto, told The Current's Matt Galloway.
"I embrace Yulia and she's holding me and I'm crying … [and] we are all very aware of who was missing, of who wasn't with us," he said.
A lawyer and anti-corruption activist, Navalny has been a vocal Putin critic for more than a decade. In 2020, he survived a poisoning attempt that his allies blamed on the Kremlin, though the Russian government has repeatedly denied any involvement.
After recuperating in Germany, Navalny returned to Russia in early 2021 and was arrested. In February of that year, he was sentenced to 3½ years for violating probation terms. He later received a separate nine-year sentence for fraud in March 2022. His supporters say the rulings were politically motivated and aimed at stifling dissent.
Roher said Navalny is now in solitary confinement, with limited access to the outside world.
"It's as if the regime is trying to murder him in slow motion. It's as if the regime wants the world to forget about him and let him languish into obscurity," Roher said.
"But his spirit is ironclad; he's a really strong guy. So if anyone can survive the ordeal, certainly it's him."
The director said Navalny's plight is never far from his mind, particularly in recent months.
"I have had this astounding success that is far beyond my wildest dreams. And it's all predicated on this guy, my friend, being in this gulag," he told Galloway.
But winning the Academy Award has helped to alleviate "a great deal of stress and guilt," he said.
"I understood that I delivered … we did good by Alexei. And that really matters to me."
Holding onto hope
Roher sees Navalny as one of the people standing up against authoritarianism — something he couldn't do if he remained in exile from Russia.
"How could he encourage a protester in Moscow or Novosibirsk or St. Petersburg to take to the streets, while he himself is sitting in Vilnius or in Berlin?" Roher said.
"He wanted to be the moral leader of the nation. He wanted to be the leader of good Russians. And that meant going back."
He can't predict what lies ahead for Navalny, including when or if he will eventually be released.
"The way I sort of think about it is that he has a life sentence. It's just a question of whose life it is, his or Putin's," he said.
But he thinks the politician in solitary confinement is holding on to one of his cornerstone values: hope.
"What else do you have if you're him sitting there in the gulag in that little cell, other than your hope for the future, your hope to see your wife and children again?" Roher said.
"I think that we have to have that hope for him and for the future of his country."
Getting word of the win
Roher said Navalny did eventually find out about the Oscar win, but had already heard some media coverage that gave him a hint it was a win for Navalny.
"The Russian radio station that they play in the prison cell was doing a recap of the Academy Awards — and they omitted … the documentary category entirely," Roher said.
The director said if he could talk to Navalny right now, he'd want to tell him all about the last six months, including the "competitive campaign" of winning an Oscar.
"There are databases and constituencies and voters and targeted advertising and events where you glad-hand and endear yourself — and I had to do that for eight months," Roher said.
"I would tell him all about my strategy, all about the ground game, all about sort of the retail politics of running the campaign — I think he'd get a kick out of that."
Audio produced by Howard Goldenthal and Julie Crysler.
