Sometimes, the long, twisted story of how Vladimir Putin crushes all opposition can be explained with a single anecdote. The short documentary Anastasia, made by Russian filmmakers, takes less than a half hour to follow a Russian woman, Anastasia Shevchenko, as she takes her mother and two children on a hard-won trip to the Black Sea. This isn’t a holiday, exactly. Shevchenko, an opposition leader who was the first Russian to face criminal charges for belonging to an “undesirable” political organization, was convicted in 2019 and put under house arrest for three years. The authorities were so ironfisted, they prevented Anastasia from visiting her oldest daughter, Alina, disabled since birth, as she was dying in a hospital. In June 2021, eight months before the invasion of Ukraine, Anastasia, her mother, and two younger children took Alina’s ashes to scatter in the sea. The film is a delicately etched miniature of grief, familial love, and in the face of Putin’s grinding repression and cruelty, remarkable courage. —Alessandra Stanley