MR NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN

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Storyline (warning: spoilers)

Mr. Nobody Against Putin is about the experiences of filmmaker “Pasha” Talankin, the videographer and events coordinator for a primary school in Karabash, a petrol refinery town of about 10,000 located in the Ural Mountains. Talankin found himself behind a camera at a time when his school’s curriculum was being remade by the Russian government, mostly to propagandize young people into docile tools of the state.
Shot over a two-year timespan, the film was smuggled out of Russia and edited in Copenhagen by Talankin’s co-director, David Borenstein. It captures the way authoritarianism accelerates in wartime. One day, students, faculty, and administrators are going about their business, and the next, the fax machine in the principal’s office is spitting out an announcement of the New Federal Education Policy This outrages Talankin, an antiwar progressive who enjoys arguing politics with more right-wing colleagues. Talankin feels increasingly guilty watching TV coverage of protesters barely older than his students getting clubbed and arrested by police. He feels like he’s doing nothing, and that doing nothing makes him complicit. So he resigns. He realizes he made the wrong choice and could use his position to collect material for a movie documenting a Russian school’s transformation into one tiny cog in a vast war machine that requires constant demonstrations of loyalty to the state. The de facto military takeover of schools crowds out real education. Almost nobody in Russia is happy about it. They only participate because if they refuse, they’ll be marked as enemies of the state. The challenge for Tamalkin was how to make such a movie without getting beaten, tortured, jailed, or worse.
It’s fascinating to see the shooting style evolve as Talankin stops being a mere record-keeper and begins using the camera expressively. The arrangement of faces and bodies within frames becomes more elegant. But there are also times, even in the more emotional scenes, when the movie lets images speak for themselves. Talankin says he knows that if he’s to rise to the level of the era he’s chronicling, he’ll have to stop being a videographer and become a director.