“Navalny,” a documentary based on an investigation by The Insider and Bellingcat and directed by Canadian filmmaker Daniel Roher, has won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film.
The film won the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary in February this year.
The documentary was screened for the first time on January 26, 2022, at the Sundance Independent Film Festival in Salt Lake City.
The documentary is largely a step-by-step account of Navalny's poisoning, which took place in the summer of 2020, through to the politician's detention at a Moscow airport in January 2021.
On December 14, 2020, The Insider, Bellingcat, and the Anti-Corruption Foundation published an investigation naming FSB officers complicit in Alexei Navalny’s poisoning with Novichok nerve agent, which the OPCW classifies as a chemical weapon.
The accidental confession of Konstantin Kudryavtsev, one of Navalny’s poisoners, was also released. Kudryavtsev spoke to his victim thinking it was the aide of Russia’s Secretary of the Security Council and gave a detailed account of the assassination attempt. In particular, he explained that Navalny had survived the poison thanks to the pilots’ actions and the atropine injection given to him by the paramedics, specifying that the poison had been applied to the politician’s underpants and that traffic police had helped the FSB to cover up their tracks.