1 day ago
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Pavel Talankin is, by his own admission early in the extraordinary documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin, not the person you or he would pick to be the hero of the story or to take on an oppressive regime. To stand up to Vladimir Putin takes a considerable amount of courage and a not inconsiderable amount of resources; Pasha, as he is known to his students, is a teacher at a small primary school in Karabash, a mining town in the Ural mountains remarkable only for its renowned levels of toxic waste, and would have been more or less content to remain the titular nobody far from Moscow. He loves his hometown, its smokestacks and Soviet buildings, but most of all loves the curiosity and enthusiasm of his students, all filmed by Talankin in his capacity as school videographer.
But Talankin has always cut a bit of a non-conformist streak – he is the one teacher with a Russian democracy flag in his classroom, a safe haven for the school’s punks and artsy weirdos, or anyone with a desire to speak freely. He is openly alarmed, to the extent one can be, when the school begins enacting Vladimir Putin’s new “patriotic education policy” following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He keeps doing his job, filming the new blatantly nationalist curriculum, the lies about the necessity of invasion told as fact, the forced military drills and oaths of loyalty forced on initially bored and apathetic children.
In time, Talankin’s job as videographer – essentially, in the eyes of the state, a role to provide proof of propaganda enacted – becomes a covert and unimaginably risky mission to document Putin’s information war at home. The subsequent film, a Danish-Czech co-production directed by Talankin and David Borenstein, is a rare and fascinating account of the encroachment of Putin’s imperial dogma on provincial Russian life. In slow-burn yet searing fashion, using official and unofficial classroom footage, off-grounds recordings, several self-filmed, direct-to-camera confessions and a healthy dose of humor, Talankin captures the makings of a propagandist youth movement. Over months, through the eyes of one brave, increasingly heartbroken teacher, we see how fear corrodes a small town, how a regime conscripts its people into becoming ideological tools, how the information operates at the local level – in short, how to brainwash a generation.
Though written by Borenstein, the film is Talankin’s – he characterizes the school’s pliant teachers and explains the new mandates. He records his disappointment at the depressing militarization of young kids, now required to march in formation and aspire to defend the motherland with guns. He shows how his classroom slowly empties of its students, too scared to speak up or preoccupied by a needless war that has conscripted their friends and family. He demonstrates, in unassuming and unadorned footage – he is, after all, supposed to be filming these new rituals and curricula for a different purpose – state coercion on how one thinks, organizes, socializes; no doubt many of these youth meetings, in which Talankin sees kids horsing around or playing along while swearing allegiance to Putin’s false justification for war, will eventually be the source of fond memories with friends.
Most movingly, Talankin serves as envoy to this new generation corroded by Putin’s ruthless ambition outside of school, as the teens make sense of their shifting reality as teens do – some tears, plenty of drinking, a lot of joking around. Talankin possesses a savvy for the aching, small details – a quick glance from one beloved student that belies her steely equanimity over her brother’s deployment; a shot of two young men, close friends just out of high school, on the eve of one’s departure for military conscription.
Any formal quibbles I had while viewing – and there were few – were easily overridden by fascination and gratitude, so infrequently is an unvarnished, honest, personal portrait of Russian daily life available to a western audience, especially since the invasion. To wit, this film was only possible because of a documentary team outside of the country, and the fact that Talankin, at great personal cost, decided to leave Russia for an undisclosed destination, an outcome the film touches on just briefly at its bookends. Mr Nobody Against Putin ultimately stands as both an act of service and a tribute – to a school that once was, to students whose lives were and will be irrevocably changed for the worse by the regime, to a once fruitful job. Talankin has produced a must-watch, indelible document of ideological warfare that echoes far beyond Russia. How’s that for a nobody?
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Mr Nobody Against Putin is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
