For a decade, Natalya Estemirova documented brutal human rights abuses in Chechnya. Her work led to her becoming one of the most prominent and respected human rights defenders working in that small predominantly Muslim region of Russia.
But on the morning of July 15, 2009, as she was leaving her apartment, she was abducted and murdered, crimes for which no one has been charged but are viewed by many as precipitated by her work.
Years later, filmmakers and former colleagues trying to tell her story encountered their own set of risks as they endeavored to draw attention to her heroism and the conditions that provoked it.
The resulting short 35-minute documentary, “Natasha,” as Natalya was known, premiered this month at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Andrew Meier, one of the two producers and directors of the film, said he does not imagine it will be shown in Russia anytime soon.
“Even revisiting Natasha’s work and Natasha’s murder is a taboo, to put it mildly,” he said in an interview. “It’s one of the big cases you just don’t talk about in Chechnya.”
Only one of the people in the film was interviewed in Russia, and that was done discreetly owing to the safety concerns the filmmakers perceived about openly presenting Estemirova’s story.
Other people they approached refused to be interviewed out of fear of retribution. Some people with footage of Estemirova declined to provide it, which became one factor that shortened the length of the film, once envisioned as a 90-minute documentary. Others who provided footage asked that their names not be listed on the credits, Meier said, as did some members of the crew that filmed in Russia.
Estemirova began her work in the 1990s, when she sought to bring attention to what rights groups said were the brutal methods, atrocities and lack of accountability in wars waged first by the Russian federal military and security forces against Chechen separatists and later by pro-Russian Chechen law enforcement officials operating under the control of the authoritarian leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov. He was installed by the Kremlin to bring the turbulent region to heel and became a ruthless leader who exerts almost total control in Chechnya.
The documentary shows Estemirova’s harrowing work cataloging kidnappings, disappearances and killings as her home descended into what the documentary depicts as a hell of lawlessness and tears.
“Why did I choose this kind of work?” she asks herself in the documentary. “Because at present, society in Chechnya is utterly broken and incapable of defending itself.”
She was 51 when she died. Several men pushed her into a white car outside her apartment in Grozny, the Chechen capital. Hours later her body was found about 50 miles away, by the side of a highway in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia, with gunshot wounds to her head and chest.
Rights groups pointed the finger at the security forces that Estemirova had implicated in abuses.
Kadyrov called her killing a “monstrous crime”; government investigators blamed the insurgents, saying they sought to embarrass the Chechen government. In 2021, the European Court of Human Rights faulted Russia’s government for failing to investigate her assassination but also ruled that the authorities could not be held directly responsible for the killing.
The film’s creators, Meier and Mark Franchetti, are former journalists, Meier for Time magazine and Franchetti for the Sunday Times of London. Both lived and worked in Russia, where they knew Estemirova as a source. In revisiting her story, they wanted to tell a personal account of an ordinary woman and her difficult choices.
“We didn’t want to make a single-issue film,” Meier said. “It was always going to be about Chechnya, but in the background. In the foreground is a mother and daughter. We wanted to make it universal.”
Franchetti said: “It really was about an ordinary woman. She was a schoolteacher who then becomes a remarkable person. This is a woman who has been completely forgotten or who was not very well known, and this was an attempt to make an honest film about her, who she was and why she mattered.”
By making it a personal story, Franchetti and Meier said they hoped to pose a question relevant to anybody when the political context shifts around them: “If war broke out in your town, what would you do?”
Estemirova, who taught history, was a single mother living in Grozny when war came to Chechnya. But she decided to act when confronted with the murders and disappearances that occurred.
Some of her former pupils “were among the dead, the tortured and among the torturers,” Franchetti said.
The film is a tribute to Estemirova’s work and bravery, but it’s also about her relationship with her daughter, Lana, and the cost to Lana of a mother who took such great risks and persisted despite death threats. In the film, the mother describes taping her sister’s address to Lana’s back in case she, Natalya, is killed in a mortar attack. People would know where to send her daughter.
“My mom did everything in her power to preserve this illusion of normality,” Lana Estemirova says in the film. “I didn’t know the chaos and total lawlessness that surrounded her.”
Yet the film describes the young girl waiting anxiously for her mother to return from her dangerous assignments. Lana was only 15 when Estemirova was murdered.
“She is not shown in the film as a perfect mother,” Meier said. “She is a single mother and she has a daughter. Many people would choose to take care of her daughter, change her profession. She did not.”
“Was it worth it?,” Meier said “We don’t answer that question.”
The makers of the film said they couldn’t travel to Chechnya to film because of the danger of making a documentary about Estemirova. They said some people who knew Estemirova and had fled the country declined to appear on camera because they were fearful of repercussions for them and for their families still in Chechnya. The filmmakers had to rely mainly on personal footage sourced from people who had fled Russia. They spent a year scouring hard drives, USB sticks and photograph collections.
Franchetti and Meier said they were careful to show those appearing in the film, like Lana, who now lives outside Russia, the final product so they were aware of the risk they were taking.
The filmmakers say that they believe their work is highly relevant today because it’s where what they describe as President Vladimir V. Putin’s rule of impunity began, at a time when Russia was still showing some signs that it might evolve into a functional democracy. Instead, they say Chechnya was the first place where Putin’s government unleashed repressive tactics that have since been used to silence dissent in Russia and beyond.
Memorial, the Russian human rights organization Estemirova worked for, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. But, as part of the clampdown on freedom of expression, it has been shut down by the Russian authorities.
The documentary includes interviews with Elena Milashina, a Russian investigative journalist who continued, like Estemirova, to shed light on what is happening in Chechnya. She was badly beaten in 2023.
In fighting the continuing tactics of repression, Meier said Milashina and the others who appear in the documentary, are “keeping the memory of Estemirova and what she stood for alive.”
Graham Bowley is an investigative reporter covering the world of culture for The Times.
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