Poison, pranks, prison: The making of ‘Navalny’

When Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist, was poisoned in 2020, he was relocated to Germany to recover. While he was there, he teamed up with a Bulgarian data-journalist named Christo Grozev, who claimed he had figured out who was behind the assassination attempt. Together, using advanced prank call technology, they managed to get an admission of guilt from a member of the team tasked with poisoning Navalny. There to capture it all was Canadian documentarian Daniel Roher. The resulting film, Navalny, is an up-close look at Navalny’s final months as a free man. Today on Front Burner, a conversation with Roher on what it was like to document Russia’s most famous political opposition leader as he recovered from an assassination attempt and made the decision to return to the country he wants to lead.