“Navalny”, “Tango with Putin” and the editor in the Kremlin
Tyranny is the enemy of storytelling, as two profiles in courage demonstrate
“LET’S MAKE a thriller,” Alexei Navalny tells Daniel Roher, and the Canadian film-maker tries to oblige. “Navalny” has many of the genre’s key elements—a hero, villains, skulduggery—but runs into an obstacle. “Tango with Putin”, a documentary by Vera Krichevskaya about Dozhd (also known as TV Rain), a gutsy Russian news channel, faces the same problem. It lies not in the directors’ craft, still less in the merits of their subjects, but something deeper: the throttling of narrative in a dictatorship.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “The editor in the Kremlin”
Culture May 14th 2022
- Welcome to the unlikely capital of rock’n’roll
- Regional foods can contain multitudes of memories
- Empires and emperors are things of the past—in theory
- Who wants to live for ever? Quite a lot of people
- “Trust” explores the power of money, and of storytelling
- “Navalny”, “Tango with Putin” and the editor in the Kremlin
From the May 14th 2022 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the editionMore from Culture
Ovation inflation has spread from Broadway to London’s West End
Why do dud plays get standing ovations?
Are mystics kooks or valuable disrupters?
A realist’s refreshing take on mysticism
Sex and Snow White: how Grimm should children’s books be?
The German authors suggest very, but today trends run the opposite way
Jimmy Lai’s trial is a headline-worthy example of injustice
A new biography aims to keep the public’s attention on the pro-democracy tycoon
Millennials and Gen Z are falling hard for stuffed animals
Plushies are cute, cuddly and costly
Ten years after the Charlie Hebdo attack, satire is under siege
Public support is waning for the right to offend