The film “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” — about a young Russian schoolteacher waging quiet resistance against the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine — on March 15 won the Oscar for best documentary feature.
Directed by David Borenstein and teacher Pavel Talankin, the film follows Talankin in his job at a school in the poor mining town of Karabash in the Urals.
The film uses two years of footage shot by Talankin to show how the Russian government of President Vladimir Putin indoctrinates students with pro-war messages.
At the request of Russia’s Education Ministry, Talankin, 35, helped film pro-war propaganda efforts at the elementary school in Karabash.
But ministry officials did not suspect he would turn his videos into a documentary about Russia’s “patriotic education” campaign for schoolchildren.
Talankin documents his own persecution and eventual exile in the film, called a “touching, intimate chronicle” by The Hollywood Reporter.
“Mr. Nobody Against Putin” is about how you lose your country, and what we saw when working with this footage is that you lose it through countless small, little acts of complicity,” director Borenstein said on stage alongside Talankin.
“When we act complicit, when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities, when we don’t say anything, when oligarchs take over media and control how we produce it,” Borenstein added.
‘It’s Unreal’
Before the ceremony in Los Angeles, Talankin said, “If you had told me two years ago that things would be like this, I would have laughed in your face.”
“It’s unreal — things like this just don’t happen.”
Talankin, also known as Pasha, fled Russia in the summer of 2024 with the hard drives containing what would become the documentary feature.
Talankin met Borenstein online, he told CBS, and filmed for two years while Borenstein directed remotely from Europe.
The film won a BAFTA award in London in February for best documentary.
