From Classroom to Cinema: The High Stakes of ‘Mr Nobody Against Putin’
The Bengali Roots Editorial Desk
Yet despite all this glittering, at the Dolby Theatre, what seemed as much an irrelevance to me as I felt chalk-dust would prove in my classrooms – no more than a fine layer at most – has had its demands for attention met.
This year’s Academy Awards brought these two worlds together as never before. When Pavel Talankin and David Borenstein took the stage to accept their Oscar for Mr Nobody Against Putin, an independent film success which toppled a powerful Kremlin myth.
Key issues with the movie: The documentary has entangled Russia in a thorny tangle of diplomacy and ethics as it discusses the “patriotic lessons” now being taught across all public school programmes.
As the Non-Resident Bangladeshi (NRB) community lives in various countries but all share Bangladeshi origins, the film serves as a fascinating case study of the camera’s power.
The Art of Defiance: Eight-bourgoneer Pav Talankin was actually instructed by his school administration to film war propaganda with video cameras and release it on the Web as an “internal record” for faculty. But he decided to take another path:
His secret collaboration with American director David Borenstein, including taking the footage out of China “in a life-or-death theft”, turned “internal records” into a global condemnation of how Russia was militarising its youth.
The film is a haven of information about how education is used to back today’s Ukrainian offensive; it records the quiet, often chilling moments in which children are made into the new generation of “patriots”, a process that critics see as the systematic mobilisation of society.
Moscow’s Counter-Strike. While the Kremlin’s response has been late in coming, it is leaving no holds barred. Russia’s Human Rights Council are shying away from the real issues raised by the film or the push of material being used. Instead, they have fought back with a legalistic argument: It’s a matter of privacy.
The Human Rights Council said that children under 18 were filmed without their parents’ consent, and therefore, both ethical standards in documentary filmmaking were breached by its use of such footage. They formally requested both the Academy and UNESCO to investigate the documentary, calling the film a commercial abuse of school systems (Ferguson Labrusae).
The documentary was made for educational use within the school only as a record so the headmasters could show it to everyone in order that teachers give feedback, but look how things can get corrupted… Images of underage minors were used without the signatures of their parents, thus circumventing their natural responsibility.
The film polarised Russia.
This film has also become a battleground for the Russian diaspora and anti-war groups. It has brought over a half dozen people who took part on both sides in the discussion. Some say that even though it is to an extent noble to fight against state propaganda by exposing all its propaganda agents and other dirty tricks, not just one side’s dirty tricks, the question of whether or not children of those parents will be held responsible by governments themselves for criticising such activity remains perhaps a cogent concern.
A Human Rights Commission for Russia
The High Cost of Speaking Truth
After all, the price for speaking his mind is high. Talankin left Russia in 2024. Now he is in a strange, beautiful exile, living with an equal remnant of Soviet repression. He cannot go home because the only thing which might enable him to go home, his mother and siblings, sit forever out of reach, rather like people who spend their lives playing elaborate games outside one another’s space (although these are always better played in your own home – if only you could tell where that was).
The Editor’s Note
At ‘The Bengali Roots’, we like to track how history will be rewritten and recorded in the hallowed halls of power. This month, we look at the point where cinema meets sovereignty. The debate centring on ‘Mr No-one Against Putin’ is symptomatic of an age-old conflict: how to defend those most vulnerable while revealing truth to the fullest extent possible. As NRBs, we know that “home” is often defined by narratives we are allowed to tell ourselves. This article asks whether the ends of political revelation justify the means employed by a documentary film.
