Mr. Nobody Against Putin

Mr. Nobody Against Putin

Sundance Film Festival

VERDICT: A Russian high-school teacher becomes an unlikely undercover activist in this brave documentary, exposing the poisonous spread of Putin's pro-war propaganda.

In tyrannical regimes, even small gestures can take on a dangerously heroic dimension, from disrespecting the national flag to playing Lady Gaga songs in public. Mr. Nobody Against Putin chronicles how an idealistic small-town teacher becomes an unlikely activist and citizen journalist, meticulously exposing how the Russian school system is being weaponised to promote the war in Ukraine. A clandestine collaboration between high-school video-maker Pavel “Pasha” Talankin and Copenhagen-based American director David Borenstein, this timely documentary offers a highly personal, emotional charged insider’s view of how Putin’s ongoing imperial aggression is proving corrosive and divisive on the domestic front, destroying young lives and forcing even mild-mannered educators to risk everything by speaking truth to power. Talankin is now living in exile for his own safety.

If Mr. Nobody Against Putin feels a little disjointed and under-explained in places, that is forgivable. The film-making process was tortuous, with Talankin and Borenstein only able to communicate sporadically over an encrypted line, using coded language in case of discovery. Their belated in-person collaboration only happened late in the project, after Talankin fled Russia. Then the pair had to shape a coherent 90-minute narrative from hundreds of hours of footage, excising anything that could imperil any of the real people appearing on screen. Despite these limitations, this is a brave and timely film, a rare and empathetic ensemble portrait of ordinary Russians living with the daily mental and physical pressures of dictatorship. World premiering at Sundance film festival this week, this European co-production should find a healthy global audience, boosted by backing from Britain’s BBC and Danish state broadcaster DR.

An engagingly geeky and energetic presence on camera, Talankin clearly loves his job as a teacher, events organiser and official videographer at the biggest high school in Karabash, a remote industrial town nestled in the Urals around 1100 miles east of Moscow. Although Karabash is infamous for its toxic climate and short life expectancy, Talankin expresses only deep fondness for his shabby home town and its citizens. Crucially, he enjoys a particularly close bond with his teenage students, who treat him more as friend and confidante than authority figure. There are unavoidable echoes here of Robin Williams as John Keating in Dead Poets Society (1989).

Already a compulsive video diarist, Talankin is well-placed to document the official wave of pro-military propaganda that sweeps Russia following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. These Kremlin-imposed changes heavily impact the school routine, where a new “patriotic education” curriculum forces glum-faced students to take part in daily flag-waving ceremonies, study revised pro-Russian history books, join paramilitary youth clubs and even attend lectures by Wagner Group mercenaries. If these methods sound familiar, most are throwbacks to the darkest days of the Soviet Union. Children are once again being brainwashed to blindly obey a ruling party elite. In the case of adolescent boys, they are also being groomed for imminent military conscription.

Talankin initially has no choice but to comply with these harsh new rules, dutifully filming patriotic classroom rituals and pro-war street demonstrations. But inside he is deeply conflicted, and cannot hide his anger forever: “I feel like I’m an alien in my own town,” he complains. “Love for your country is not about putting up a flag.”

He begins staging impulsive personal protests, like blasting Lady Gaga’s version of “The Star Spangled Banner” over the school speaker system instead of the obligatory Russian national anthem, or transforming pro-war Z symbols taped across classroom windows into anti-war X symbols. As Putin announces a censorship crackdown and harsher jail sentences for dissident voices, even these tiny acts of resistance come with a huge potential risk. Soon, understandably, even sympathetic students begin warily distancing themselves from their favourite teacher.

After concluding that “even a guy like me should have some principles”, Talankin finally offers the school his resignation, but he changes his mind when a more subtle and potentially far-reaching form of protest becomes possible. A random connection with a Russian media company leads him indirectly to Borenstein, who proposes a documentary collaboration. Talankin then continues his regular video work, but this time he is gathering evidence of Putin’s pro-war indoctrination to smuggle out of the country. No longer just a small-town educator, he becomes more like an undercover whistle-blower.

Most of the secondary characters in Mr. Nobody Against Putin are depicted with compassion and nuance, more victims than villains in Putin’s propaganda machine. But a clear monster emerges in the shape of Talankin’s colleague, history teacher Pavel Abulmanov. Straight out of central casting as a ghoulish Kremlin groupie, Abulmanov seizes on the school’s strict new curriculum with sinister relish, lecturing students with comically lurid fabrications about Ukraine’s “Nazi” regime and western Europe’s imminent economic collapse. In one especially creepy clip, he lists his personal heroes from the Soviet era, including Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, widely reviled as a sadistic mass murderer and serial rapist. It comes as no surprise when Abulmanov’s fawning loyalty to the regime is later rewarded at a brazenly rigged prize-giving ceremony.

Mr. Nobody Against Putin is mostly shot in fairly conventional hand-held reportage style, augmented by a few playful cutaways and captions, plus a lyrical finale which packs extra emotional weight as Talankin’s veiled farewell to his beloved home town. The film’s mood is initially freewheeling and genial, but inevitably darkens as the grinding war in Ukraine comes to dominate Russian domestic discourse. Between soul-searching confessions to camera, Talankin sees several of his former students drafted to fight in Ukraine, some of whom never return. His own mother offers only fatalism, arguing that Russians have always craved war: “people love to shoot each other,” she shrugs cheerfully.

The story is book-ended with Talankin’s escape to an unnamed foreign country in summer 2024, sketched out in carefully spare detail here, which has the nerve-jangling urgency of a spy thriller. Inevitably, with the war ongoing and Putin still in power, this open-ended conclusion lacks a satisfying sense of closure. Even so, Talankin and Borenstein have created a gripping and valuable document of how a 21st century dictatorship operates, the banality of evil captured in real-time detail, with cynical old men poisoning innocent young minds.

Directors: David Borenstein, Pavel Talankin
Screenwriter: David Borenstein
Cinematographer: Pavel Talankin
Editors: Nicolaj Monberg, Rebekka Lønqvist
Composer: Michal Rataj
Production companies: Made in Copenhagen (Denmark), Pink Productions (Czechia)
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (World Documentary Competition)
In Russian
90 minutes