‘Everyone was freaking out’: Navalny novichok film made in secret premieres at Sundance

A documentary film about Alexei Navalny, who narrowly survived an apparent poisoning attempt with novichok, has premiered at the Sundance film festival.

The 90-minute film, simply titled Navalny, features fly-on-the-wall footage of the Russian opposition leader, filmed during the several months he spent in Germany in late 2020 as he recovered from the poisoning. There are interviews with Navalny, his wife, Yulia, and his closest team.

The most extraordinary sequence of the film is when, from Navalny’s Black Forest recuperation hideout, he made a prank call to one of the hit squad he believes carried out the poisoning, and got him to reveal details about the hit by pretending to be an angry security services boss.

“I remember just being like, ‘OK, make sure we’re rolling, keep it in focus. This is the most important thing you’ll ever film in your entire life,’” said director Daniel Roher in an interview with Hollywood Reporter about the moment of the telephone confession.

“Afterward everyone was freaking out. We were running around like chickens with their heads cut off. I was like, ‘Let’s offload the footage right now. Should we call the police? Do we need protection at the house?’”

Roher was initially planning to make a film on a different topic with Christo Grozev, a Bulgarian investigator working for Bellingcat, the team of online sleuths and investigative journalists.

Related: Russia’s FSB seeks to arrest journalist who worked with Bellingcat

However, after Navalny’s poisoning, Grozev began looking for clues about who might have been behind the hit. Having bought telephone and flight records on the Russian dark web, he found a group of eight men from the FSB security services who appeared to have been following Navalny on trips across Russia for several years.

Grozev contacted Navalny and journeyed to Germany to meet with him and share the information he had found. Roher came with him and kept filming. It turned out Navalny and his team had already been thinking about making a film, and a collaboration began.

“When Alexei woke up from his coma in Berlin, he had two visions. One was of doing this gigantic investigative video about Vladimir Putin’s palace and his illicit wealth. And the other was to do this big, in his mind, Hollywood documentary movie,” said Roher.

Navalny fell ill in August 2020 while taking a plane from Tomsk in Siberia to Moscow. Thanks to the quick actions of the pilot, who made an emergency landing in Omsk, he did not die, and he was later transported to Berlin, where he made a long and slow recovery.

Related: ‘Psychological violence’: Alexei Navalny says he is forced to watch eight hours of state TV a day

The Kremlin has denied involvement in the poisoning and President Vladimir Putin has refused to say Navalny’s name in public, referring to him obliquely as “that gentlemen”, “a certain character” or “the Berlin patient”.

The film closes with Navalny’s return to Russia in January 2021. He was detained on arrival at the airport and later sentenced to two years and eight months in prison, for supposedly violating the terms of his sentencing over a previous conviction for fraud that was widely seen as politically motivated. He is serving his sentence in a penal colony 60 miles east of Moscow.

Since Navalny’s poisoning, his Anti-Corruption Foundation has been declared an extremist organisation and many of its leaders and regional coordinators have been forced to flee the country.

The making of the film had been kept under wraps until earlier this month, and its presence on the Sundance programme was only publicised at the last minute. The premiere took place online on Tuesday evening, as this year’s Sundance is virtual due to Covid. Maria Pevchikh, a close associate of Navalny who was with him in Tomsk when he was poisoned, was the film’s executive producer.

At the end of the film, Navalny answers a request from the director to record a message for the eventuality that he were killed on his return. “I’ve got something very obvious to tell you: don’t give up, you’re not allowed. If they decided to kill me, it means we are incredibly strong, and we need to use this power,” he said.

In an Instagram post announcing the film, Navalny complained in his usual irreverent tone that the prison library where he is serving time does not have a subscription to HBO Max, so he will not be able to watch it.