Tributes to “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” poured in on Monday after Pavel Talankin, a videographer from a small-town Russian school, won an Oscar for his anti-Kremlin film and cemented his place in Hollywood history.
Netflix documentary “The Perfect Neighbour” had been widely tipped to win the top prize for best documentary feature.
But 35-year-old Talankin’s film -- based on hours of footage he had smuggled out of Russia -- beat the odds and took home the statuette on Sunday.
Some said it was a story worthy of a Hollywood script.
After the start of Moscow’s war against Ukraine, Talankin was instructed by school authorities to film patriotic lessons and morning drills at his secondary school in the Russian industrial town of Karabash.
Seeking to resist the intensity of pro-war propaganda at his school, Talankin eventually teamed up with US filmmaker David Borenstein and fled Russia in 2024, leaving behind his mother, brothers and sisters.
Vitaly Mansky, one of Russia’s top documentary makers, called Mr Nobody a “strong” film, though its win still came as a surprise.
“I think that the figure of Pavel Talankin played a very big role in the Academy members’ decision to vote for this film,” Ukrainian-born Mansky told AFP. “It truly is a Hollywood story.”
Mansky, a member of the Academy, said Talankin’s sincerity won people over.
“They were moved to vote for the film,” he added.
Speaking to AFP in the lead-up to the Oscars, Talankin said he and Borenstein were up against strong competitors.
“Netflix, they are giants,” Talankin, who lives in Europe, said this month.
But he also joked he was ready for the fight.
“I’ve already dusted off the shelf for it,” he told AFP in January, referring to the golden statuette that he ended up taking.
Film critic Anton Dolin said he was not surprised by the film’s success.
“The film stands out, just like its protagonist,” he said.
In his acceptance speech Talankin said Russia’s war against Ukraine as well as other wars must stop.
“For four years we have looked at the sky for shooting stars to make a very important wish,” he said in Russian.
“But there are countries where instead of shooting stars, they have shooting bombs and shooting drones.”
“In the name of our future, in the name of all our children, stop all these wars. Now,” he added.
In his speech, Borenstein appeared to draw parallels between the policies of Vladimir Putin in Russia and Donald Trump in the United States.
“Mr Nobody against Putin is about how you lose your country,” he said.
“What we saw when working with this footage is that you lose it through countless small little acts of complicity.”
The Kremlin has sidestepped questions about the documentary.
“I did not watch this film,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday.
Russian state-controlled media either ignored the film’s win or chose their words carefully.
One news outlet said: “A film about President Vladimir Putin received an award at the Oscars.”
The documentary has proved polarising even among anti‑Kremlin Russians, and some argued that children were filmed without parental consent.
Alexander Baunov, an international policy expert, said he liked the film, adding he wished he had been part of such a project when he himself was a schoolboy in the Soviet Union.
For many children featured in Talankin’s film their participation in the project, he said, “will remain among the most important events of their lives, if not the most important”.
bur-as/ah/yad
