Alexander Litvinenko spends three years before his death telling his own story to documentary maker Jos De Putter: his years inside the Russian secret service, his posting in Chechnya, and his claim that a series of apartment-block bombings blamed on Chechen terrorists were actually the work of the FSB, staged to clear Vladimir Putin's path to power. That interview footage becomes the spine of a film shot in the shadow of Litvinenko's actual death in November 2006, poisoned with a radioactive substance in his London home after what doctors first treated as food poisoning. Filmmakers Jos de Putter and Masja Novikova follow the story past the funeral that December, sitting down with widow Marina Litvinenko, his father Walter, Chechen leader and close friend Akhmed Zakayev, and Russian exile Vladimir Bukovsky. Marina describes how she met her husband, their flight to England, and his final days. Made for VPRO's Backlight strand, the film sits at the point where one man's account of his own past and the unresolved politics of his death meet head-on.