Winner of the Sundance Festival Favorite Award, “Navalny” is a thrilling documentary that follows Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny as he investigates the circumstances of his own attempted assassination.

Aleksei A. Navalny, the imprisoned Russian opposition leader, has long been adept at using social media to directly convey political messages threaded with dispatches about the corruption and lavish spending of his country’s government officials, including some at the highest levels.

In August 2020, Navalny was poisoned while on a trip to Siberia to film a video about local corruption. Russian doctors blamed low blood pressure, saying no poison was found in his system. But under duress, officials eventually allowed him to be flown to Germany for treatment, where the poison was identified as a military-grade nerve agent from the Novichok family.

As he recovered there, Daniel Roher, a 28-year-old documentary filmmaker from Toronto, set out to use his own form of storytelling to shed light on the dissident: following Navalny for months as he conducted another investigation, this time into his own poisoning.

The resulting documentary, “Navalny,” is both a look at Navalny’s efforts to uncover the culprits who poisoned him as well as a call to action directed at his supporters in case of his imprisonment, a hypothetical that was quickly borne out.