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A Russian teacher filmed classroom war propaganda, and the smuggled footage is now an Oscar-nominated documentary. But émigrés are split.

Source: Meduza

This year’s Oscar nominees for best international feature film include the documentary “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” assembled from footage smuggled out of Russia in 2024 by its creator, Pavel Talankin, a teacher and videographer near Chelyabinsk. With the help of the American documentarian David Borenstein, who edited the material, Talankin has fashioned a portrait of Russian state indoctrination, using as his case study the very school where he taught. Since its premiere at Sundance in 2025, the film has provoked sharply divided reactions, inspiring some viewers while infuriating others. Meduza film critic Anton Dolin examines the difficult questions the documentary raises and explains why it deserves to be seen as an important record of wartime Russia.

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From a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival a year ago to its recent Academy Award nomination, Mr. Nobody Against Putin has dominated the documentary conversation this awards season, though even sympathetic critics acknowledge that the acclaim has little to do with the film’s artistic merits. Edited into a coherent and absorbing narrative by David Borenstein, this daring project from videographer Pavel Talankin has brought global attention to how children and teenagers in today’s Russia are indoctrinated in classrooms and at “patriotic” events.

Opinions about the film are sharply divided. Is it the work of a fearless anti-war activist who gathered footage undercover? The answer is complicated: though he worked officially at the school and was tasked with filming lessons, assemblies, and ceremonies, his intent was subversive from the start. Or is it an immoral stunt that could have harmed Talankin’s own colleagues and students? Is it the unfiltered truth about today’s education system in a totalitarian state, or opportunistic garbage by a small-town narcissist chasing an Oscar? An act of love, or maybe a hit job commissioned by the hateful West? 

Does it really all come down to the familiar fault line between those who left Russia and those who stayed? This reviewer, a typical émigré, is closer to the first camp. But much of the commentary from inside Russia — and not just by propagandists and government types, but also by anti-war intellectuals — has rejected the film as dishonest and dismissed its creators as cynics.

It’s true that Mr. Nobody Against Putin suffers from artificiality, especially in Talankin’s monologues, which seem either overly scripted or over-rehearsed. The musical score, intended to sustain emotional intensity, more often intrudes than enhances. Yet the film has real strengths. The footage itself may not shock anyone who has lived in Putin’s Russia and visited smaller towns, but Talankin and Borenstein have hit a raw nerve with this documentary, intentionally or not.

The film offers something new: a portrait of propaganda’s machinery with unprecedented clarity. Those of us who follow Russia know what’s happening, but none of us can measure how well the indoctrination is working. Opinions range widely, from “nobody takes it seriously” to “they’ve all gone crazy over there.” Mr. Nobody Against Putin shows both cause and effect — how indoctrination actually works.

Yes, the teachers stumble and seem almost embarrassed as they try to articulate the words “demilitarization” and “denazification” before children who blink up at them. High schoolers smirk and shrug while listening to the pseudoscientific nonsense of Pavel Abdulmanov, a history teacher who serves as the film’s antagonist and admits on camera that, of all the “great figures” of the past, he would most like to have met the Soviet secret police bosses Lavrentiy Beria, Viktor Abakumov, and Pavel Sudoplatov. Ultimately, city officials award Abdulmanov an apartment — not just for his loyalty, but for providing the state with a steady supply of cannon fodder. The boys who grow up under this system go willingly to the front, wearing the same bewildered smiles they had in class, and do not return.

Maybe what matters isn’t the quality of the propaganda but its sheer volume and the absence of any alternative. It brings to mind the scene in Alan Parker’s Pink Floyd — The Wall where schoolchildren, wearing disturbing masks and marching along a conveyor belt, are fed into a meat grinder. Each student is “just another brick in the wall” — an image that evokes the “Great Russian Wall” that separates the restored Tsarist autocracy from the outside world in Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Day of the Oprichnik.

The film also complicates the ethics of protesting alone — the only form of public resistance possible in Russia today, given the state’s ban on anti-war collective action. Consider the anti-war pianist Pavel Kushnir, who in July 2024 became the first political prisoner in modern Russia to die during a hunger strike. Or Sasha Skochilenko, who was sentenced to seven years in prison for replacing price tags in a supermarket with leaflets about Ukrainian civilians killed in the invasion. Skochilenko’s activism inspired a short film by Alexander Molochnikov, which was shortlisted for the Oscar for best live-action short film.

Talankin’s very appearance, persona, and tone likely irritate many viewers. His story more closely resembles a comedy than a serious drama, particularly given the happy ending — he successfully smuggled his footage out of the country, the film was completed, and it has enjoyed undeniable success. But this oddball, who admits he’s always been an outsider, is compelling precisely because he defies conventional patterns and does not present as some heroic fighter. He’s “Mr. Nobody,” as he says right in the title, and ironically, that’s what helps him fly under the government’s radar.

Talankin’s actions are nonetheless extraordinarily brave: not merely the filming but also, for instance, switching off display screens showing patriotic rallies, or recording audio at the funeral of a local man who was killed in the war. Any of this could land him in prison for a long time. He neither calls for resistance nor publicly encourages imitation, but Talankin is clearly walking a tightrope. Only those wrestling with guilt over their own inaction could dismiss this. Talankin knows these feelings too, and the film’s tone makes clear he’s not just trying to get famous in the West. His chances of crossing the border safely and reaching Europe were always slim. In the end, he left Russia in the summer of 2024 and was granted asylum in the Czech Republic.

He was simply lucky.

Perhaps the most interesting and challenging aspect of Mr. Nobody Against Putin is its handling of patriotism — a concept that many have considered taboo in Russia since 2014, almost like a dirty word. Talankin does not try to catch his ideological adversaries in hypocrisy. Instead, he understands that many of them sincerely believe the Kremlin is doing the right thing, while others embrace opportunism from ignorance or despair, not because they’re evil. What matters to Talankin isn’t exposing his opponents but defending his own vision of patriotism.

Talankin’s story is set in Karabash, a notoriously polluted city that teems with ugly factories and concrete housing blocks. Yet the landscape is filmed and presented here with a poetic force rarely found in documentary footage. When Talankin says goodbye to his students at their graduation ceremony, it’s genuinely moving. The film literalizes the familiar motherland-as-mother metaphor: Talankin’s mom, a dour school librarian, brushes aside her son’s subversive ideas and doesn’t realize he’s leaving for good. 

This part of the film has a sensitivity and even a remove that is absent elsewhere. There is no trace of artificiality here. Just as Talankin’s former students increasingly distance themselves from their dissident teacher, his own mother wants no part of his internal struggles. His small hometown seems to reject him like a foreign contaminant, and a split becomes inevitable. What was once mutual love between a man and his native city suddenly becomes one-sided, and the finished film reads as Talankin’s sad love letter to Karabash.

You won’t find anger, vindictiveness, or resentment in Mr. Nobody Against Putin — none of the traits critics routinely attribute to émigrés. There is only desperation and the inevitable futility of protest, alongside an irrational faith that film and language still have power.