This year's Best Documentary has some crucial lessons for us all

Sunday, 22 March 2026

REVIEW: Mr Nobody Against Putin was an unlikely winner of the Best Documentary award at this week's Academy Awards.

The Academy usually favours bigger, flashier and more obviously shocking films.

Especially if they have a celebrity name attached, perhaps to dial in a cameo or a narration.

But Mr Nobody is a small, quiet film.

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It was shot on a couple of cheap cameras by a young man living in a town of 10,000 people in the heart of Putin's Russia.

There is no obvious violence on screen and no big twists or sudden reveals are waiting to be unveiled in the closing minutes.

It is just a document of a couple of years in the life of a teacher, watching and recording the changes he sees around him.

But its cumulative effect, over a pretty deftly assembled 90 minutes, is devastating.

Pavel Talankin worked as a teacher organiser and videographer at The No.1 school, in the town of Karabash, in Russia's Ural Mountains.

Karabash is reputedly the most polluted town on Earth. Decades of copper mining and smelting have turned the soil and water into a toxic potpourri.

The adult life expectancy in Karabash is 38.

And yet, Pavel loves the place.

He loves the slab-sided, Soviet era apartment block he lives in.

He loves the minus-40 degree winter storms.

And most of all, he loves the school he works at, with its roster of bickering teachers and staff, and its bright, impassioned, hard-working students.

But in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.

Pavel, in his capacity as the school's only film-maker, began to record the televised announcements that were played in school classrooms.

Soon, new lesson plans arrived, with instructions on how the invasion was to be framed and explained.

Then came the songs and poems, to be recited and performed at every assembly and gathering.

Pavel and his colleagues are cynical and amused at first, and then uneasy and angry at the part they are expected to play in indoctrinating their own students into blindly supporting a war they know next to nothing about.

The following year, a partial conscription is announced, and Pavel can only watch and film as boys he taught for years are driven away on green trucks, quite possibly never to return.

By late 2024, Pavel knows he has to leave.

He has said too much, and the whole town knows he is an agitator and a protester.

Plenty of people still like and support him, and admire his courage and grit.

But no-one will risk speaking up to protect him.

A chance comment on an Instagram post has put Pavel in touch with film-makers in Europe and the USA.

We are not shown exactly how Pavel escapes Russia.

But we are left with the impression it was clandestine and dangerous.

Mr Nobody Against Putin is a portrait of how a country falls into dictatorship and totalitarianism, and of how a population become indoctrinated and then passive in the face of the most outrageous lies and nonsense from their leaders.

It is not a sudden process, and there aren't many definitive markers left for the historians of the future to point at.

But slowly, maybe over the course of a decade or so, this same process could happen almost anywhere.

And once there is no-one left to question the new regime, and the history books have all been sanitised and rewritten, then quaint ideas like democracy and free speech can go extinct for whole generations.

Mr Nobody is a slow burning film. It never shocks or jolts us. But I think that is the point.

It's only as the credits roll and we begin to process and take in what we have seen, that the horror of it becomes apparent.

The playgrounds have become parade grounds and army recruitment centres as we watched, and yet we barely noticed as it happened.

Mr Nobody Against Putin is an act of resistance and quiet heroism, and a hell of a worthy Oscar winner.

And, trust me, once you have seen it, you won't be able to stop thinking about it.

Mr Nobody Against Putin is on DocPlay now.