In David Borenstein’s Mr. Nobody Against Putin, Pavel Talankin, a Russian teacher, is enlisted along with other educators in his country to help with the brainwashing of his students into supporting the war against Ukraine but opts instead to send everything he records with his camera to a filmmaker working on a very different story.
Awards Buzz spoke with Borenstein about how Pavel was such an interesting person to work with and how he never knew what he was going to get footage-wise but always knew it was going to be worthwhile:
“I think Putin says it in the film himself: it’s not armies that win wars, there are not commanders that win wars, it’s teachers that win wars. He enlisted people like Pasha to help him win this war, but in this case, it backfired on him because Pasha went rogue. From the beginning, we set up an encrypted FTP server, and he was constantly uploading throughout the process. It’s true that he smuggled out his drives at the end, but I actually already had a lot of that footage, because he was constantly uploading. So every morning, I would wake up to new footage from Pasha, from Pavel. And it was different stuff every day. Some days it would be something like a rap video that he produced with his students. Other days it would be first-person cinematography of him walking up and down the halls of school or eating cabbage soup at the lunch table. And then some days you’d wake up and you would see footage of Wagner soldiers teaching little kids how to use grenades and teaching them how to identify landmines.”
Watch the video above to hear about security concerns related to Pavel’s continued safety and how Borenstein feels about having made a film in this manner.
Mr. Nobody Against Putin is on the Oscar shortlist for Best Documentary Feature.
