Navalny’s “terribly happy” documentary about him won an Oscar

Tallinn – Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said on Wednesday he was “awfully glad” that a film was detailing his poisoning and political activism won the Oscar for Best Documentary.

In a series of tweets that appeared on his account on Wednesday, the politician congratulated director Daniel Roher and others involved in the making of “Navalny,” as well as his wife Julia and his allies at the Anti-Corruption Foundation.

“Obviously I’m terribly happy, but while I’m happy, I try not to forget that it wasn’t me who won the Oscar,” Navalny said.

The documentary portrays Navalny’s career in fighting official corruption, his near-fatal nerve agent poisoning in 2020, which he attributes to the Kremlin, his five-month recovery in Germany, and his return to Moscow in 2021, where he was immediately arrested at the airport . He was later sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison and was sentenced to an additional nine years last year.

Navalny is under unrelenting pressure from the authorities. He spent several weeks in isolation in a tiny “punishment cell” and was placed in a restricted housing unit for six months last month. He is virtually barred from phone calls or visits from his family, while apparently being allowed to write letters or occasionally visit his lawyers.

Navalny confirmed this in the tweets on Wednesday He learned about the Oscar while attending a court hearing via video link from his 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 on it, so the lawyer had to say it out loud: ‘Your film won Oscar. “

“I had a very strange feeling at that moment,” said the politician. “It was like those words didn’t even belong in this world, but then again, everything here is so weird and crazy it feels like that’s the only world they belong in.”