At the end of 2024, Pavel “Pasha” Talankin was a teacher in a primary school in Karabash, an industrial town near the Ural Mountains in Russia. He had never been abroad. His salary was €150 a month. A little over a year later, Pasha is co-director of an Oscar-shortlisted film, Mr Nobody Against Putin. He is living in exile in Europe with no chance of returning home in the foreseeable future, and has been travelling the world with his movie.
It has been quite a journey…
Pasha hadn’t met his fellow director, Copenhagen-based David Borenstein, when they started work on the movie. At times, he wasn’t sure if he could trust Borenstein and suspected he might be the victim of an elaborate hoax. He had started filming in the school because he wanted to draw attention to the extreme propaganda being force-fed to the kids in the wake of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“To see that transformation with Pasha, to see the road he has taken in the last year and a half, will I ever see something like that again in my life? I don’t know…it is dramatic! That has been a joy to me,” Borenstein marvels at how the softly spoken former teacher has transformed his life.
“Right now, there is no conceivable path for him to go back to Russia. There would have to be pretty earth-shattering political change for him to go back,” Borenstein observes of Pasha’s current situation. The ex-teacher is living in an undisclosed location in Europe and is being paid two years’s back salary by the producers. (The film was made through Made in Copenhagen with support from Danish Film Institute, Czech Film Fund and Nordic Film and TV Fund among other backers.)
Since the Sundance premiere in January 2025, festival has followed festival. “I don’t know the final number but it’s in the hundreds,” Borenstein says.
Yes, it may be a “little repetitive” being asked the same questions and racking up the miles, but Borenstein is very conscious that Pasha “sacrificed his entire life” to make the film and so is willing to do whatever he can to promote it. Besides, he adds, “there have been so many good festivals.” He cites events “where you can really get together with a local community” like Full Frame in Durham, North Carolina or the DMZ Festival in South Korea “where the opening film, which was us, played on the border of North Korea basically. There was a big outdoor stage. If you were a North Korean soldier walking round the demilitarised zone, you could see it or hear it.”
Mr Nobody Against Putin is sold by Dr Sales at the time of writing – it is finally about to confirm North American distribution arrangements, almost exactly a year after its Sundance premiere.
Back in Russia, the film is also proving surprisingly popular. “I would say our second premiere was Karabash because Sundance has a digital festival. During that, someone from Karabash got a US VPN, got the film, then and recorded the screen. That bootleg copy started circulating and within a week everyone in Karabash had seen the film.”
Inevitably, Russian officialdom took notice. Within a few weeks, the FSB [the secret service] from the neighbouring municipality had a closed-door meeting at the school. “They told everybody just to treat Pasha as if he was dead, and never speak to him again.”
Earlier in his career, Borenstein worked in China for 10 years. He speaks the language and knows the culture inside out. “When I was making Mr Nobody Against Putin, I kept imagining what the reaction would have been if we had made the same film in China. I’m pretty certain it would have been very vitriolic…but that really wasn’t the case in Russia.”
Responses to the film among Russians were very varied. “It was surprising the amount of ideological diversity. There were so many people in Karabash and throughout Russia as the film got out more, who were quite supportive.”
In particular, teachers rallied behind the documentary. Pasha was far from the only one to quit a teaching job because of the absurd ideological pressures placed on schools. Thousands of others did the same. Many felt the film depicted perfectly the dilemmas they had faced.
“At the same time, of course, there are so many nationalists in Russia. He has had to continue to endure threats and attacks…”
Familiar smear tactics have been used. Defamatory articles appeared in the Russian media calling Pasha a paedophile. Influencers trolled him, calling him “dirty, dirty names.” Pasha has taken the online abuse in his stride, laughing it off. His aim when he began the project was to become an international whistle-blower. That was why he started filming the Russian education programme put in place after the full-scale invasion. He shot hundreds of hours detailing the Orwellian nightmare still unfolding in Russian schools.
Borenstein’s influence was to make the documentary more about Pasha himself and to introduce humour and a strong personal dimension to the storytelling. Early on, the co-directors were sometimes at loggerheads. Pasha couldn’t understand why Borenstein was placing such emphasis on him rather than on the bigger story about the distorted school curriculum. The problem was compounded because Borenstein wasn’t able to share early cuts of the film with Pasha. The BBC (who backed the film through BBC Storyville) advised that it would be safer not to show him the material. This meant that Pasha at first, didn’t quite understand the perspective of the movie or the fact that Borenstein was looking at Russian state propaganda through him as a character.
Now, both filmmakers agree that they complement each other and that the film “was the result of both of our sensibilities. When it comes to tone, both Pasha and I tend to meet horror with humour. I also think that to understand the full tragedy of the loss of his classroom, you need to see the warmth and love, to understand how special it was, before the full weight of the authoritarian takeover of the school…I also think that humour is the reality of living under an authoritarian regime – not only is it brutal but it’s absurd – and humour is one of the primary coping mechanisms..”
A few days ago, Pasha realised it was the birthday of Mr Abdulmanov, the likeable but ultra-nationalist, Putin-supporting history teacher from the school. Before the full-scale invasion, the men were friends. Now, Pasha is living in exile in Europe and they have ended up on different sides of a huge ideological divide. On a whim, he texted Abdulmanov, to wish him happy birthday. The history teacher replied instantly, thanking him and wishing him all the best. You can’t read too much into the exchange, but at least it shows that human values still count for more than the distortions of propaganda.
