Navalny is in solitary confinement but did get word of Oscar win, says director Daniel Roher

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Accepting the Oscar for best documentary last month, Canadian director Daniel Roher said he could share the stage with Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of prominent Putin critic Alexei Navalny.

Roher won the documentary Navalny focuses on the opposition leader, who survived a poisoning attempt in 2020 and was later imprisoned when he returned to Russia.

Yulia closed her acceptance speech with a message to her husband: “Alexei, I had a dream [of] on the day when you will be free, and our country will be free. Stay strong my love.”

Backstage, he and Roher hug, and the director breaks up.

“I immediately cried … all the feelings, all the emotions in that moment came out,” Roher, who was raised in Toronto, told Now Matt Galloway.

“I hugged Yulia and she held me and I cried… [and] we all know who’s missing, who’s not there,” he said.

A lawyer and anti-corruption activist, Navalny has been a vocal critic of Putin for more than a decade. In 2020, he survived a poisoning attempt that his allies blamed on the Kremlin, although the Russian government has repeatedly denied involvement.

After recovering in Germany, Navalny returned to Russia in early 2021 and was arrested. In February of that year, he was sentenced 3½ years for violating the terms of probation. He then accepted the separation a nine-year sentence for fraud in March 2022. Supporters say the decision is politically motivated and intended to stifling dissent.

Roher said Navalny is currently in solitary confinement, with limited access to the outside world.

“It’s as if the regime is trying to kill him in slow motion. It’s as if the regime wants the world to forget about him and let him fade into obscurity,” Roher said.

“But his spirit was iron, he was a strong man. So if anyone could have survived the ordeal, it would have been him.”

The director said Navalny’s fate was never far from his mind, especially in recent months.

“I’ve had this amazing success far beyond my wildest dreams. And it’s all predicated on this person, my friend, in this gulag,” said Galloway.

But winning the Academy Award has helped to alleviate “a lot of stress and guilt,” he said.

“I know that I sent … we did well by Alexei. And that is very important to me.”

Holding on to hope

Roher sees Navalny as one of those who fight against authoritarianism – something he cannot do if he remains exiled from Russia.

“How can he encourage the demonstrators in Moscow or Novosibirsk or St. Petersburg to take to the streets, while he is sitting in Vilnius or in Berlin?” Roher said.

“He wants to be the moral leader of the nation. He wants to be the leader of the good Russian people. And that means going back.”

They cannot predict what Navalny will do, including when or if he will be released.

“The way I sort of think about it is that there is a life sentence. It’s just a question of life, or Putin’s,” he said.

But he thinks that politicians in solitary confinement hold onto one fundamental value: hope.

“What else are you doing while you’re sitting in the gulag in that small cell, other than the hope for the future, the hope that you’ll see your wife and children again?” Roher said.

“I think we should have hope for him and the future of his country.”

Take the words of the winner

Roher said that Navalny eventually found out about his Oscar win, but had heard some media coverage hinting that he had won. Navalny.

“A Russian radio station that played in a prison cell did a recap of the Academy Awards — and they eliminated … the entire documentary category,” Roher said.

The director said that if he could talk to Navalny now, he would like to tell him everything about the past six months, including his “competitive campaign” to win the Oscar.

“There are databases and constituencies and voters and ads and targeted events where you like and like — and I had to do this in eight months,” Roher said.

“I’ll tell them all about my strategy, all about the ground game, all about retail politics during the campaign – I think they’ll get a kick out of it.”