Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said Wednesday he was “terribly happy” that a film about his poisoning and political activism won the Oscar for best documentary feature.
In a series of tweets on his account on Wednesday, the politician congratulated director Daniel Roher and others who took part in the filming of “Navalny,” as well as his wife Yulia and their allies at the Anti-Corruption Foundation.
“Of course, I’m terribly happy, but as I celebrate I try not to forget that I wasn’t the one who won the Oscar after all,” Navalny said.
The document narrates Navalny’s career and his fight against official corruption, the poisoning with a neurotoxic substance that almost caused his death in 2020 and that he attributes to the Kremlin, his five months of recovery in Germany and his return to Moscow in 2021 when they stopped him immediately. He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison and last year he was sentenced to nine more years on other charges.
Navalny faces unrelenting pressure from the authorities. He spent several weeks isolated in a tiny “punishment” cell and last month he was transferred to a restricted unit for six months. He cannot receive phone calls or visits from his family and is apparently only allowed letters and visits from his lawyers occasionally.
In the tweets, Navalny confirmed Wednesday that he learned about the Oscar while attending a court hearing via video link from prison. He said his lawyer tried to break the news to him by holding a piece of paper in front of a camera, but Navalny couldn’t see what was written. Then the lawyer said it out loud: “Your movie won an Oscar.”
“I had a very strange feeling at that moment,” said the politician. “It was like those words didn’t belong in this world, but then again, everything here is so weird and crazy that it seems like the only world they belong to.”
