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- He was the best-known Russian opposition figure in the world: Alexei Navalny, critically poisoned in 2020, arrested in 2021 and locked up in notorious prison camps ever since. On February 16, 2024, Russian media reported his death. Navalny was only 47 years old. The film documents how he became Putin's fiercest opponent and where he stood politically. On February 16, 2024, Russian media reported the death of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny. He died under still unclear circumstances in the Russian penal colony No. 3 in Siberia. Navalny was only 47 years old. The film documents how Navalny became Putin's fiercest opponent and where he stood politically. Director Igor Sadreev had been secretly working on a film about the most famous Russian opposition figure for a long time. After Russia's attack on Ukraine, he smuggled the extensive filming material out of the country and left Moscow. When he arrived in Berlin, he was able to finish the film together with his colleague, the journalist Aleksandr Urzhanov. The two managed to convince companions, friends and critics to tell Navalny's career from their perspective. These interviews paint a contradictory picture of the prominent Kremlin critic: the beginnings of someone still searching at the liberal party "Yabloko", the expulsion after xenophobic videos and racist statements, the rise as a charismatic anti-corruption activist. Navalny's story becomes a gripping story about the pitfalls and dangers of striving for political power in Russia. But in a system that allows no alternatives, opposition politicians pay a high price.
- Biography of Soviet/Russian dissident and liberal politician Valeriya Novodvorskaya, an attempt to rethink her heritage in the light of the historical events of recent years.
- Started as a testament to the 2020 protests in Belarus and their brutal repression, this story has become universal ever since. There are fewer and fewer places in the world where it cannot happen. Wars, repression, forced emigration have become a reality for millions of people. We have chosen just two of these millions: it is enough to hear and understand. The cruel whirlwind of history brought them together on August 9, 2020, the day of the presidential elections in Belarus. They could have been good neighbors or acquaintances, but they found themselves pitted against each other, in the roles of the victim and the aggressor. It seemed that there was nothing they could do. But both proved this was not so. There is still a way between desperate action and inhuman indifference.
- Cultural scientist and journalist Anna Narinskaya researches the spread, within Soviet society, of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and stereotypes that built on existing Russian traditions. A rabbi, a musician, a sociologist and her father explain the hypocritical treatment Judaism was exposed to in the USSR. A policy of silence was practiced, there were black lists containing the names of Jewish students not permitted to enter technical universities, and Jews were expected to Russify their names. In the political culture of post-war Stalinist society, anti-Semitism was deeply rooted, culminating in the 1952 campaign against the supposed "doctors' plot" of the so-called Jewish "killer doctors." They were accused of wanting to assassinate Stalin. After the Six-Day War, anti-Israel propaganda ultimately took on ever stronger anti-Semitic tones. One conspiracy theory comes across as more absurd than the next. For instance, that of the "Zionist ruble", a commemorative coin to mark the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution on which some people believed to have discovered a Star of David. The popular cartoon character "Cheburashka" was also suspected of being Jewish, while five new buildings on Moscow's New Arbat, shaped like open books, were interpreted as a symbolic arrangement of the Pentateuch. How Jewish life nevertheless carried on in the shadows, how the Moscow Synagogue became a place for matchmaking or how hundreds of Jews held public meetings in a forest clearing outside of Moscow in the 1970s, all of this is also explored by Narinskaya as she leads viewers through the film with no small amount of humour and (self-)irony.