The film “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” — \u2060about \u2060a \u200cyoung Russian schoolteacher waging quiet resistance against \u2060the Kremlin\u2019s war on Ukraine — on March 15 won the Oscar for best documentary feature.<\/p>\n
Directed \u200cby 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.<\/p>\n
The film uses two years of footage shot by Talankin to show how \u200cthe Russian government of President Vladimir Putin indoctrinates students with pro-war messages.<\/p>\n
At the request of Russia’s Education Ministry, Talankin, 35, helped film pro-war propaganda efforts at the elementary school in Karabash.<\/p>\n
But ministry officials did not suspect he would turn his videos into a documentary about Russia’s “patriotic education” campaign for schoolchildren.<\/p>\n
Talankin documents his own persecution and eventual exile in the film, called a “touching, intimate chronicle” by The Hollywood \u200cReporter.<\/p>\n
“Mr. Nobody Against Putin” is about how you lose your country, and what we saw \u2060when working with this \u200cfootage is that you lose it through countless small, little acts of complicity,” director Borenstein said on stage alongside Talankin.<\/p>\n
“When we act complicit, when a government murders people on the \u200cstreets of our major cities, when we don’t say anything, when oligarchs take over media and control how we produce it,” Borenstein added.<\/p>\n
‘It’s Unreal’<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
“It’s unreal — things like this just don’t happen.”<\/p>\n
Talankin, also known as Pasha, fled Russia in the summer of 2024 with the hard drives containing what would become the documentary feature.<\/p>\n
Talankin met Borenstein online, he told CBS, and filmed for two years while Borenstein directed remotely from Europe.<\/p>\n
The film won a BAFTA award in London in February for best documentary.<\/p>\n
With reporting by Current Time, Reuters, and AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The film “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” — \u2060about \u2060a \u200cyoung Russian schoolteacher waging quiet resistance against \u2060the Kremlin\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":478334,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,50,154,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-478333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-news","tag-russia","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478333\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/478334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}