Mr. Nobody Against Putin

David Borenstein is an American-born, Copenhagen-based documentary maker whose earlier Dream Empire followed a Chinese property boom through the foreigners hired to make ghost cities look inhabited. Mr. Nobody Against Putin came to him differently: the footage arrived from Russia, sent by the man who shot it. Pavel Talankin, the videographer at a school in the Urals town of Karabash, is credited as co-director, and the film is a Danish–Czech production for Made in Copenhagen with ZDF/Arte. It premiered at Sundance in January 2025 and won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award.

What Talankin had access to was the ordinary machinery of a school: assemblies, corridors, staff rooms, the annual concerts he was paid to record. After February 2022 the same equipment was turned to patriotic pageantry — military drills, lessons on the war, letters to soldiers. He carried on filming both the official version and everything around its edges, and the film's power comes from that doubling. Nicolaj Monberg and Rebekka Lønqvist's editing holds the two registers together without commentary, letting a child's face or a teacher's hesitation do the work.

Reception was close to unanimous: 100% on Rotten Tomatoes across fifty-two reviews, and the film went on to win both the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the BAFTA. Critics treated it less as reportage than as evidence — a first-person record of how a state reaches into a classroom, assembled by someone who was required to operate the camera.