SIGMA recently caught up with the DoP of the Academy Award-winning Documentary "Navalny", which won Best Documentary at this year's awards ceremony to chat about how he ended up filming this exciting project and what made him chose the SIGMA Cine prime lenses for this film.

Niki Waltl, AAC is an Austria-based Director of Photography, who lensed "Navalny" for director Daniel Roher. Niki mainly specialised in filming documentary projects, however over his decade plus long career as a cinematographer, he has also shot multiple narrative projects and commercials as well.

"Navalny" is currently streaming on the major streaming platforms and you can check out the trailer below.

Niki Waltl shared his experience of using the the Sigma's FF High Speed Cine Primes to film this documentary in a recent interview posted on the official Sigma blog.

“As this film is a political documentary that plays in contemporary time, we felt like we wanted a clean image. The SIGMA lenses gave us exactly that. Also, they are very fast and can be shot wide open without any problems. That was great as early on Daniel Roher, (the director) and I agreed that we want to shoot this project with a short depth of field.”

Navalny, Documentary, (2022)

Follows the man who survived an assassination attempt by poisoning with a lethal nerve agent in August 2020. During his months-long recovery he makes shocking discoveries about the attempt on his life and decides to return home.

Dir: Daniel Roher
Cinematographer: Niki Waltl
Production company: CNN Films, HBO Max
Produced by: Diane Becker, Shane Boris

Which SIGMA CINE lenses were used to film this documentary?

Niki Waltl actually owned a set of Sigma cine primes and the production company allowed him the freedom to chose his own camera/lens package. He primarily shot the film on his RED Gemini camera and a set of Full-Frame SIGMA High Speed CINE primes, which included the 20mm T1.5, 28mm T1.5, 40mm T1.5, 85mm T1.5 & 135mm T2 focal lengths.

He mainly focused on using the 40mm on the A-camera and 85mm on the B-cam for the cinema verite scenes, while relying on pretty much all focal lengths for the interview portions of the film. Additional SIGMA 24mm and 50mm lenses needed to be rented for cameras C and D for the interviews, which involved multiple camera angles giving the editor more choices in post.

To read the full interview head over to the SIGMA blog here.

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