Christo Grozev

So clearly there's a motive there.

You kept going on that line of track, and let me show a clip that you worked with the journalist Christo Grozev, uh, about a particular Russian intelligence unit.

It's a piece of accounting.

An officer of 29155 received a bonus for work on, quote, "Potential capabilities of non-lethal acoustic weapons."

So with, with Christo's help and the folks at, uh, uh, the Insider-

Mm-hmm

... .ru, which is a group of exiled Russian journalists, uh, we were able to access phone records, uh, internal emails, uh, from Russian officials, GRU officials, government officials, that indicate travel patterns that match Havana Syndrome incidents.

So Christo came to us with that information.

Perhaps the most extraordinary information I learned after my release was that the FSB had a backup plan for, for my arrest.

Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist, had offered me his help in figuring out the lingering questions around my arrest.

Tall, lanky, and unassuming, his apartment fits the stereotype of a hard-driving, even obsessive investigator.

During my first visit, a couple of empty wine bottles stood on the floor of the kitchen His walls were covered with whiteboards and tack boards filled with the faces of Russian intelligence operatives.

And I just like stay up late at night watching these like YouTube tutorials, learning how to do the black and white balance or this, this, you know, and you know, the focus and how to, and then do playing around with like editing on my computer.

And I went off and I made this short film, this short documentary, you know, and it was just kind of like me being, Trying to be creative again, you know trying to feel like what what it is that I love to do and eventually that kind of led me out of the relationship and that short documentary led to a bigger documentary and Led to another documentary after that until like really a short period after that period I found myself just I'm kind of a wanderer so I was wandering and I found myself in Jordan in the Middle East having dinner at a friend's house and this person that I met at that friend's house led me to Christo Grozev who's this investigative journalist who was the one that brought me into meet Alexei Navalny and then yeah I was like lived with in the same village as he and his wife and his daughter and during covid during the period from him being poisoned and recovering in the Berlin Charité hospital until return to Russia and we made this crazy film that was just a very small team myself Daniel Rohr who's the director I produced and then We found a couple local people who became like gems and part of our core team, Nikki, who is our DP, Marcus, our sound guy, and like the four of us just running around after Navalny, you know, all these days in the Black Forest and got to know him so well and created this incredible documentary, just begging everyone to work for free.

I'd be like, come on, like, please, I'll find a way to pay you later.

Like putting, you know, stuff on my credit card, just like, higher and higher, Christos credit card, just doing whatever we could, because I didn't have a lot of contacts in like the documentary world to be like, hey, can you give us 50K to keep shooting? We just like found a way.