Daniel Roher’s documentary about Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader and outspoken critic of Putin, garnered the Best Documentary Feature during a slap-free 2023 Oscar ceremony held March 12.
The Netflix film The Elephant Whisperers, about an Indian couple’s relationship with a baby elephant, received the nod for Best Short Doc.
In Navalny, the eponymous subject sets about investigating his own attempted murder (he had been poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in the remote Siberian town of Tomsk in August 2020 when he was making a film about corruption). Together with Bellingcat journalist Christo Grozev, Navalny uncovers the sinister plot against him and succeeds in actually identifying his would-be assassins, further revealing the threads that go all the way to the top of the Kremlin. In the film’s dramatic core scene, Navalny actually calls one of his own hitmen and tricks him into telling all about the failed murder attempt.
Taking to Business Doc Europe in January 2023, director Roher commented: “All of the awards – and the recognition that comes with winning awards – is, more than anything, a marketing exercise. In this case, what I am doing is marketing the plight of the world’s foremost political dissident who today is locked up in perpetual solitary confinement because he is the number one anti-war activist in Russia.”
Other nominees in the Oscar 2023 Documentary category were All That Breathes by Shaunak Sen; All the Beauty and the Bloodshed by Laura Poitras; Fire of Love by Sara Dosa, and Simon Lereng Wilmont’s A House Made of Splinters.
Oscar Short Doc winner The Elephant Whisperers concerns a couple, Bomman and Belli, who adopt an abandoned baby elephant, Raghu, nurse him back to health and form a very deep bond with him in the process.
In a January 2023 interview with Business Doc Europe, Gonsalves stressed how The Elephant Whisperers “has something in it for everyone…There’s a message in it for people who’ve lost their husbands; for people whose kids have gone off to school; for adopted kids…I want people to understand the special bond that we share with other living beings.”
“It took five years to make the film. I just wanted to show the world this beautiful bond between man and nature – the sacred bond that also Indians share with elephants,” Gonsalves underlined.
Other nominees in the Oscar 2023 Short Documentary category were Haulout by Evgenia Arbugaeva, Maxim Arbugaev; How Do You Measure a Year? by Jay Rosenblatt; The Martha Mitchell Effect by Anne Alvergue and Debra McClutchy, and Stranger at the Gate by Joshua Seftel.
