Cinema For Peace Chief Responds To Alexei Navalny’s Death; NGO Airlifted Activist From Russia in 2020: “I’ve Been Afraid For Months”
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Jaka Bizilj, the founder of the Berlin-based Cinema for Peace Foundation which organized the airlift from Russia of opposition activist Alexei Navalny after his poisoning in 2020, has responded to his sudden death in an Arctic Circle jail on Friday.
“Seeing the kind of treatment that they were giving him, I’ve been afraid for months that they were going to kill him,” Bizilj told Deadline.
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He suggested the writing had been on wall for Navalny ever since the death of Wagner mercenary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in a plane crash in August in the wake of his aborted coup over the summer.
“The Prigozhin case, the uprising, showed that Russia is not as stable as we all believed. After the killing of Prigozhin, Navalny was next on the list… I don’t think Putin saw him as an immediate threat but he was afraid of him in the long run,” said Bizilj.
Slovenian promoter and producer Bizilj created the Cinema for Peace Foundation in 2008 as an international non-profit organization with the goal to foster change through film.
Over the years it has worked with a host of stars including Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney and Oliver Stone.
It is currently gearing up for its annual gala in Berlin on February 19, which will fete Pope Francis [by video], Hillary Rodham Clinton and former UN chief Ban Ki-Moon.
Further attendees will include Sharon Stone, Helen Mirren, Omar Sy, Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk, and Russian journalist Marina Ovsyannikova, who rose to fame after she protested against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on a live news bulletin.
Bizilj is now working with Russian political activist and Pussy Riot co-founder Nadya Tolokonnikova to create a commemoration to Navalny within the gala.
Daniel Roher’s documentary Navalny was feted at the event in 2022 with the Cinema for Peace Award for Justice.
Bizilj was instrumental in organizing a plane to airlift Navalny from the Siberian city of Omsk to Berlin after he collapsed during a flight to Moscow in August 2020. It was later revealed he been poisoned by a Russian security services agent.
“Nadya Tolokonnikova called me in Berlin and asked me if I could evacuate him with a private plane with a medical crew and get to him to the Charité hospital in Berlin because I’d done the same thing two years before for Peter Verzilov [a Pussy Riot member who was poisoned in 2018],” he recalls.
Bizilj arranged a plane with funds from private donors and then enlisted the support of then German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron to exert pressure on Russia to allow for Navalny to be transported to Germany for treatment.
Bizilj never met Navalny in person because he ended up in intensive care in the Charité Hospital himself with a severe case of Covid-19 in late 2020.
“I got out in January but I wasn’t allowed to see anyone and was doing rehab at home. By the time I was well enough, he had flown back to Russia. So, we’ve never actually met but I have met his people and his wife.”
Navalny flew back to Russian on January 17, 2021 and was detained at border control at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport and then placed under arrest.
At the time of his death he was serving a 19-year sentence in one of Russia’s harshest jails on charges of extremism that were seen as politically motivated.
Questioned on whether Navalny made the right decision to return to Russia, Bizilj said it was a question of perspective.
“There are two answers. From the perspective of today, the decision was wrong, but from the perspective of that time, he was an extremely brave and courageous man. He was prepared to become the Nelson Mandela of Russia, to go to prison and suffer for his people until change would come and Putin would not be the president anymore,” he said.
“Everybody else who stayed out of Russia lost relevance immediately. In order to have influence in Russia he had to go back. This decision has to be understood from this perspective.”
This year’s Cinema for Peace gala will be accompanied by the inaugural World Forum on the Future Of Democracy, Tech and Humankind.
Running from February 18 to 19 at the Allianz Forum next to the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, its aim is to promote the renewal of democracy and freedom at a time when both are under threat.
Panels for the inaugural edition, set prior to Navalny’s death, will include “The role of dissidents – Navalny, Ai Weiwei, Pussy Riot, Joshu Wong & others” and “Russia After Putin”, which will gather a number of prominent Russian political dissidents.
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