Mr Nobody Against Putin wins Best Documentary Feature Oscar

The documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin, which explores the growing use of military propaganda at a Russian school following the invasion of Ukraine, won Best Documentary Feature at the 98th Academy Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday night.

Pavel Talankin, an educator from the city of Karabash in the Russian Urals, shot much of the footage used in the film during his time working as a videographer at a local school, a role that required him to film “patriotic” events, school plays and parades.

However, he also used the opportunity and his unique access to document the growth of ultranationalist and pro-war propaganda being used to brainwash pupils within the Russian school system. After fleeing Russia, Talankin shared his footage with American director David Borenstein who put the film together.

“Mr Nobody Against Putin is about how you lose your country,” Borenstein said in his acceptance speech. “What we saw when working with this footage is that you lose it through countless small, little acts of complicity.”

Making a allusion to the current political situation in the United States under Donald Trump, Borenstein cautioned that “we all face a moral choice” when “a government murders people on the streets of our major cities, when we don’t say anything when oligarchs take over the media and control how we can produce it and consume it, … But luckily, even a nobody is more powerful than you think.”

Also addressing the academy, Talankin, who spoke in Russian via a translator, said that: “For four years now, we have been looking up at the starry sky and making our most important wish. But there are countries where it is not stars that fall from the sky, but missiles and drones. For the sake of the future, for the sake of the children, stop all wars now.”

When asked to comment on the film’s win on Monday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters that he “couldn’t possibly”, explaining that he hadn’t seen the documentary himself. “To comment on it, you need at least to understand what it’s about. I’ll refrain from making any comments for now.”