A photo from the documentary "Mr. Nobody Against Putin"Courtesy of Kino Lorber
This post has been updated to reflect that Mr. Nobody Against Putin won the Best Documentary Oscar on March 15, 2026.
Pavel Talankin is a teacher from a small mining town in Central Russia. He spent two and a half years documenting how his school was conscripted into Putin’s war propaganda machine for the Oscar-nominated documentary, Mr. Nobody Against Putin.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, his school changed almost overnight– teachers ordered to deliver government scripts and students marched through military drills. Talankin was required to film it all as the school videographer, and what he witnessed made him want to walk away from his job entirely. Instead, he connected with documentary director David Borenstein, and together they turned his footage into a feature film.
Borenstein said Talankin “wanted to show how quickly totalitarianism can take over a school, a workplace, a government, and how our complicity becomes fuel in that fire.”
It’s a message Talankin originally hoped to share with fellow Russians. But he now believes the film speaks to a far wider audience than he could ever have anticipated when he began filming.
He points to a joke circulating in Eastern Europe: the Belarusians say they and the Russians are watching the same TV series- only Russia is a few episodes behind.
“I am sorry to tell you,” he says, “that America has begun watching this series, too.”
