© Kino Lorber
Paval Talankin - Mr. Nobody Against Putin (2025)
Paval Talankin in Mr. Nobody Against Putin (2025)
Pavel Talankin is an unlikely Oscar winner. He spent his life as event-coordinator-videographer at a grade school in Karabash, Russia, population 10,000, a fly speck copper smelting town previously known for toxic air pollution and low life expectancy. Talankin was content with his job, his town and his country, until Vladimir Putin launched his assault on Ukraine and tightened his already hard grip on Russia. Mr. Nobody Against Putin, composed from Talankin’s video record of how war and politics played out in one small Russian town, took the Academy Award for Best Documentary.
Talankin, the star of his film, concedes that he was never willing to confront a tank—or even a cop. He tells us he was a lonely child but was happy to find work he enjoyed in the school he once attended, an unimposing structure that will remind Americans of countless school buildings erected in the Eisenhower era. During his workdays, he videoed classrooms filled with happy children and brightly colored party balloons, he recorded piano recitals, and in Mr. Nobody, his camera zips from kitchen to cafeteria, lavatory to library (when he isn’t in his apartment with his dog, named Nebraska for reasons unexplained).
And then, breaking TV news: Vladimir Putin, phlegmatic as ever, announced his “special military operation,” as he euphemistically called his war. Putin imagined a blitzkrieg with a swift knockout, but once Russian advances stalled, he put his regime on new footing—or so it looked to Talankin in a town far from the center. Putin’s creeping authoritarianism, hardly noticed in Karabash, visibly transformed into something approaching totalitarianism.
Uncritical Patriotism
A “Federal Patriotic Education Policy” was imposed to whitewash history and mandate displays of uncritical patriotism. When Talankin asked the school’s history teacher for his heroes from Russia’s past, the teacher named several Stalinist murderers, including the loathsome Lavrenti Beria, the sadistic chief of the secret police and the Gulag prison system. To mobilize school students, Putin recreated the old Soviet youth organization with a new name and an ideology of nationalism in place of Communism. The Karabash school became increasingly militarized, with show and tell by the Wagner Group mercenaries and a grenade throwing contest with trophies for the winners. Talankin was uniquely positioned to document how Putin’s policies were translated for consumption by school kids.
He also set himself as the story’s point of light amidst the gathering darkness. He displayed a small pro-democracy flag in his office and encouraged students and ex-students to gather and share their concerns, especially the threat of conscription. But the environment grew more threatening when Putin’s 2023 law stiffened penalties for the loosely defined crime of treason. “You are so aware that you can’t change anything, you’re trapped in the system,” he says. Although he shoots a propaganda video of a pro-war demonstration in Karabash, he pulls pranks of resistance, substituting Lady Gaga’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” for the Russian anthem on the school PA system. “Do you want to go to prison?” his mother asks.
Fed by a fact-poor diet of distorted newscasts and patriotic music videos, and the threat of state terror, the people of Karabash seem largely apathetic and become reticent in the presence of Talankin’s camera. After being shadowed by police, the videographer slipped out of Russia in 2024 and with support from the BBC and other European producers, assembled Mr. Nobody Against Putin with the aid of American documentary filmmaker David Borenstein. The film is a unique document of a particular place in a time of catastrophe, a carefully calibrated act of courage with universal implications about the danger of indifference (or ignorance?) in the face of evil.
Mr. Nobody Against Putin is screening at the Oriental Theatre.
