In the wave of documentaries About the Ukraine war that has come out in the last two years, there has not been one that has been offered what Daniel Borenstein’s “Mr. Nobody against Putin“Do – and certainly not with such breadth, verve and insight: the view inside Russia.
Borenstein is the credited director, but the visuals themselves were largely handled by Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, a guy with an impish grin and a free-thinking sensibility who worked as a videographer and events coordinator at Karabash Primary School #1. Karabash is a small town of 10,000 in the Ural Mountains, which outside visitors has tried to paint as the “most polluted city in the world” because of its copper smelter which one observer says has resulted in the town’s population having an average life expectancy of 38. “It isn’t that bad,” Pasha says in his voiceover right after that. And so much of film What follows is about highlighting the dark turn Russia has taken since the Ukraine war — especially when it comes to indoctrinating its children — it’s also a message to the West: Russians don’t all think, and they don’t all live in grinding, squalid conditions.
Since Talankin shot nearly all of the footage in his role as the school’s videographer himself, he is credited as DP (and as co-director) for “Mr. No one against Putin. And while he aims for the kind of nuance the West doesn’t usually see in depictions of Russia, he is clear about the all-out descent into totalitarianism that the country has experienced since the harrowing days of February 2022, when Vladimir Putin began his ” special military operation” against Ukraine.
Not too many years removed from the school himself, Pasha has the kind of connection with the students there that suggests someone who was a student there himself. We see him filming poetry readings and trying to shoot a music video with the older students (the school appears to be a K-12). And then suddenly, in February 2022, they are asked “from above” to start staging patriotic displays and the singing of anthems about the motherland. It is about both indoctrinating the students and making sure that the school staff is willing to indoctrinate the students when they are ordered so that the government knows that the adult population falls in line (which priority is more important is unclear, although we also know in the US, as seen in The documentary “Libraries”, That political actors in bad faith believe that indoctrinating children will help achieve future goals). Pasha must then upload all the patriotic videos to a mysterious government website.
From that point, each Schoolday begins with a “presentation of Colors” ceremony that requires the children to make a military march. “Are we completely screwed?” Pasha asks his supervisor when the order comes down to start doing this. “Fuck! It hurts!” Suddenly, class lectures are about the need to “demilitarize” and “Denazify” Ukraine. Assault Rifle demonstrations are held. And younger students are encouraged to join a new “patriotic” group that has its roots in the Soviet pioneers (but which most American viewers watching this will be inclined to think of as Akin to the Hitler Youth).
The way Pasha shows us that these things are added to the curriculum, it is clear that it was not always this way. Russians have a greater diversity of thought regarding Putin and the Ukraine war than is commonly recognized in the West. And this particular slide into totalitarianism is a fairly recent development (giving hope that it can be reversed). Presumably, Putin felt that the buildup of propaganda efforts for the Ukraine war, a war in which Russians may feel they are fighting their brothers and sisters, required more effort than anything attempted for Russia’s involvement in the wars in Syria and Chechnya.
There are definitely some true believers here. A teacher, Mr. Abdulmanov, wins an award because he has turned his history class into a veritable daily propaganda lecture. When asked, he includes Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s NKVD head and a notorious murderer and sexual predator (several children’s skulls were found on his property, among others), as one of his personal heroes. Even Pasa’s mother, a librarian whom he clearly loves (though he says he never told her), supports the war—though her justification is that “our people have always been involved in all the battles” and that “people love to shoot each other ”.
Over time, Pasha makes contact on Instagram with a producer in the West who is interested in pictures taken about how the war is communicated in Russia. That’s probably how this resulting film turned out. But Pasha also gets it into his head to start subverting the daily propaganda at the school, which could make him a target even before he delivers the pictures he’s taken to the producer.
One day, Pasha even subverts the daily “Procession of the Colors” ceremony by replacing the Russian national anthem with Lady Gaga’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner,” stating in his voiceover that nothing could be more threatening to the regime than The fact that it was Gaga’s version. The Western perception might be that Pasha would be spirited away to a Gulag as soon as he did, but nothing happens immediately. However, there is a police car that is suddenly parked in front of his apartment building. And he knows he’ll have to leave the country if he’s ever going to share all the video footage he’s taken. There are moments when Pasha laments what happened here, though he immediately qualifies it by saying “Of course, it’s nothing like what’s happening in Ukraine.” But even, grief for former students he knew who have been drafted and sent to Ukraine and never returned.
When the school’s graduation ceremony finally arrives, Pasha uses the opportunity to give a speech that is both honoring grades and a statement about how much he himself has learned here – in retrospect, everyone would have recognized it as a farewell speech. And actually he escaped the next day.
Borenstein brought all this together in a film that is not only a revealing bit of journalism on Talankin’s part but a satisfying character study of an independent thinker suddenly confronted with totalitarianism. You root for Pasha so hard in all of this, even though, based on the existence of this footage and his retroactive voiceover, you know from the start that he has to be okay. “Mr. No one against Putin” is unique in dealing with serious issues of war and dehumanization with a light, even humorous and certainly personality-filled, touch – in the serious documentary landscape of attack-attack, it is a unicorn. The fact that it leads to more empathy and understanding and a capacity to see ordinary Russians in a more human light makes it a profound film as well as an engaging one.
Grade: a-
“Mr. No one against Putin” World premiered in the World Cinema Documentary Competition of 2025 Sundance Film festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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