wx2026-0224 POSTSHOW MrNobody.mxf-audio

0:00This is democracy now, democracynow.org, the Warren Peace Report. I am Amy Goodman. This week marks four years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Europe's biggest conflict since World War II, as the fighting enters its fifth year, entire cities in Ukraine's south and east have been reduced to rubble. The Center for Strategic and International Studies says Russia has suffered 1.2 million casualties, including up to 325,000 troop deaths between February 2022 and last December. While Ukraine suffered up to 600,000 military casualties, including up to 140,000 deaths, Meanwhile, Russia's stepped up its crackdown on dissent, including those opposed to the ongoing war. We turn now to a new film, it's called Mr. Nobody Against Putin, an Oscar-nominated documentary

1:09that tells the story of Pavel Talankin, Pasha, a primary school teacher and school videographer who becomes an international whistleblower. After being reluctantly drawn into Putin's propaganda machine, he starts documenting how ordinary Russians are indoctrinated with pro-war messages and recruited for the war. Here's the trailer for the Oscar-nominated documentary, Mr. Nobody Against Putin. Hello, this is me. I'm the event coordinator at Carbash Primary School Number One. I'm also the school videographer. We've to the camera. This office here is a pillar of democracy. I'm giving them the space to be kids. In this moment, I have no idea the amount of trouble I'm about to cause for myself.

2:16I decided to conduct a special military operation. We need to get the kids to recite some patriotic songs and speeches. Are we completely fucked up? I was instructed to shoot all the events. I'm these kids propaganda. I love my job, but I don't want to be a pawn with the regime. Do you want to go to prison? What she will tell you, she is forced to say. If you live in our country and don't love it, then you're a parasite. Leave. I'll use my camera to film the abyss the school is sinking into. It's the perfect cover. Never clasp your helmet. It will break your neck if you get shot in the head.

3:18No, Pasha. Don't do this. Go ahead. Film the flag. Here. I think what you've done is going to make a big impact. Teacher. The lawyer you go to. Commanders don't win wars. I'm quoting the teachers win wars. Marching steps and march. After nobody against Putin, it won the 2026 BAFTA Award for Best Documentary and the Special Jewry Award at the Sundance Film Festival. It's also been nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. For more, we join now by Mr. Nobody Himself, Pavel Talankin, his nickname is Pasha, the narrator, the subject, and one of the directors of the film, previously a teacher at a primary school in Kharabash, Russia.

4:19Also with us is the film's co-director, David Borinstein. We welcome you both to Democracy Now, David, let's begin with you. How did you learn about Pasha, what he was doing in his school? How did you come to collaborate on this film? So Pasha actually responded to a casting call on the Russian Internet. I had put out some feelers looking for a story in Russia, and simultaneously this Russian company puts up a casting call saying, how has your job changed because of the special military operation in Ukraine or so they call it in Russia? And they were actually looking for positive stories from the Russian perspective, so they were looking for stories of people writing letters to soldiers and things like this. But Pasha sees this casting call, and he got angry. He wrote a letter saying, let me tell you how my job has changed, I've been turned into a propagandist, and I'm filled with guilt every single day coming into my work.

5:23So we sent that in, and he sent it into a random Russian web content company on the other side of the country. It was actually quite risky. The first of many risky things he would do to make this film happen. But as it turns out, it landed at that company and it landed on sympathetic eyes, who started forwarding that message around, and it reached me. And so Pasha and I, we started talking very early on, and we came up with the idea to make a film together. In the beginning, we didn't know how we would make it. We experimented with me sending a DP to Karabakh to film him, but after some time it became apparent that Pasha himself would be an amazing co-director on this film, and we just started working together as two directors. So before we go to Pasha in the London studio, I want to go to a clip that really introduces him from Mr. Nobody against Putin, which reveals one after resistance on the part of our guest,

6:28Pasha, Pavel Telenkin. Yes, sometimes I take a super risky decision, but I can't look at the Z on the windows of the school. Therefore, instead of this, I glue X, the symbol of support of the refugees from Ukraine. The clip ends with Pasha posting pictures of the X on windows, on social media with the hashtag No to War. Pasha joins us now, Pavel Telenkin in the London studio. You've been nominated for an Oscar along with David Boranstein as the directors of this film about you, Mr. Nobody against Putin. Talk about what motivated you as the school's videographer and school's teacher to begin to resist after the war Russia invaded Ukraine, and how people responded along the way.

7:39My estimate is that you... My goal most of all with this film is for people to see it inside of Russia. I want more and more people to see it. I need for as many people as possible to see what is happening inside of Russian schools. It all began when the first directors from the government came into the school with requirements of what lessons to teach, and that's when I got really angry and knew that people needed to know what was going on, and that's what led to the film. So really, my motivation was that people know that what these children are being forced to hear, that Putin is forcing propaganda into their schools and they're absorbing all of this, and we'll see what kind of generation winds up in five or ten years after they've

8:41been learning this every day. Why do you see Lady Gaga singing the U.S. National Anthem as a form of resistance? That happened the day after the U.S. announced that it was an unfriendly relationship with the government of Russia. I saw an interesting map recently. It was a map of places in the world where it's safe to drink tap water. We're drinking water is safe directly from the faucet. And then I saw another map of which countries in the world are considered unfriendly to Russia, and it's interesting, those two maps completely coincide. They overlap perfectly. I think it's a part of that. Can you tell us about your city in Russia? Can you talk about this place that is one of the most toxic places on earth? That's not the main point of the film.

9:43It is the casualty tool, the effect on the kids who will go off to war, a number of them do during your film, to fight against Ukraine. Karabash is a small city. Like other small cities where everybody knows each other, people talk to one another. But it also has a copper smelting plant, which unfortunately has really harmed the environment. But this Karabash has a midiplavillian plant, which affects the ecology very much. Also talk about the casualties, this horror of the kids as they get older, this war is now, it's the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion, becoming old enough to go to Ukraine,

10:45to attack Ukraine. All the more and more people are going to war. Mostly the kids are just kids. They graduate from high school and those that haven't gotten into university or have been dropped out or kicked out of university, they really are called immediately some might sign a contract, but others are drafted and they all go off to war and they're really young. And it's a horrible tragedy and many of them don't come back as they see in the film. In the war, unfortunately, there are guys who are not returning from there, and it's a very sad and very tragic year. So explain when you talk about the directive, how it changed also the teachers and you were one of them, how they had to read directives to the children and they started marching

11:47around the school and more than that. The 14th of March, so really just after the war started in 2022, on the 14th of March, the directive started coming into the school. And they were sheaves and sheaves in paper with photos and lesson plans and videos and very complete instructions and curriculums of what the teachers were supposed to do and say about the war, how they were supposed to talk about Ukraine, and part of my job as the school's videographer was to film all of this and then upload it to prove to the government that we were fulfilling all of their requirements. And of course, a lot of the teachers understood that these things have nothing to do with their actual academic subjects that they have to teach, but they were forced to do this and if they had resisted, there were all kinds of disciplinary consequences.

12:51There could be fines or things a lot more serious, too. Despite understanding this has nothing to do with their jobs as pedagogs, they had no choice. There was even a situation that because so much of the lesson time was taken up by these propaganda lessons, the kids didn't have enough time to actually learn the curriculum and so their grades kept falling and their understanding of their subjects kept falling and the teachers were protesting saying, look, we just don't have time to teach everything, let's just stop or reduce the time of all of this other material and they said, we can't, we can't because we'll all be fired if we do. Let me bring David Borenstein back into this discussion. Talk about what you saw as you were following the video was Pasha uploading the video to you and then you're increasing concern for Pasha himself being arrested.

13:52Yeah, so in the beginning, we set up a system where footage would be sent to me via an encrypted FTP server. There was a lot of security protocols in this production. It was really, really daunting, but it got more daunting over time because when we first started, we thought, ah, maybe Pasha can contribute to this project and then he can stay in Russia. Those first months of the war was a period where people thought they could still go out and protest and things would be okay. Well, soon they learned that that wasn't the case. Within the first year of working on this project together, there was a foreign agent law that completely criminalized the way we worked together and then even more concerningly, there was this treason law that basically completely criminalized everything he's saying inside the film. So if Pasha were to get caught filming and sending the footage to me, he could end up in prison for a very, very long time, potentially

14:52for the rest of his life. So it was really, really tense. We were constantly on the edge of our seats for two, two and a half years. I don't think we realized how nervous we were until he finally fled and got out and suddenly our bodies became much looser, but it was a very, very intense process, both from security and also the process of creating this story, which had so many complex storylines and ethical kind of minefields to go around. And David, if you can explain how you encouraged and you set up this ending of Pasha leaving, how he got out of the country and I'll ask him to tell us that story as well. Yeah. Well, when we first started the film, all I knew was that Pasha wanted to show the world what was happening in these school classrooms. He wanted to give us the video that he was shooting for the Russian government. Then we had to find else what the film was

15:57going to be. I mean, he could have just given those videos to a journalist. Instead, he contacted filmmakers. So we had to decide what is the story of this. We looked for that story for a little while. And then when the treason law really kicked in, we had this realization, Pasha, if you want to get this stuff out to the world, you're going to have to leave Russia. You're going to have to leave Russia and we can potentially help you do that, but is this something that you want to do? And the kind of conversations and discussions that we had around that really big decision ended up helping us find out, helping us find out what the story of the film is because we had so many discussions. Is this the right thing to do? Would showing the world this footage make big enough of the difference? Can one person, one Mr. Nobody, really go up against someone like Putin or a regime as big and oppressive as Russia? Would it all be worth it if it meant leaving your students because

16:58you're the only teacher they can really rely on? So we had all of these discussions and we realized that these questions about the value of one person's resistance, about how much one person can do, about how much we can overcome complicity while the systems around us are succumbing to authoritarianism. These discussions and this decision, do I leave? Do I sacrifice my life in Russia to make this? Do I take a giant leap into the unknown for the small chance of this film making some difference? These discussions ended up being the plot of the film and so we helped him figure out a way to leave Russia and then kind of over the next year and a half we followed this process of him going through this transformation from teacher trapped in this Kafka-esque brutal absurd propaganda system that's creating death and destruction in Ukraine and within Russia and following him till he leaves and he

18:01makes this fateful decision. And so that was the process of finding the story of the film and after two and a half years of filming undercover, he fled. He bought a round trip ticket to Istanbul pretending like he was going on a seven-day vacation. He got there, he smuggled some footage out of the border in addition to what he had been uploading and he never went back to Russia. Talk about that, Pasha, how you got out of Russia because of course David was way beyond that border but what it meant for you organizing a commencement ceremony and then leaving how you left with your film. I had a suit, I was going as if I was going to Istanbul for seven days for vacation

19:04and but I had a suitcase that was filled with hard drives and memory cards and and the laptop and was all filled with equipment and I knew that I was going to have to go through security and go through customs and my bag was going to be open and and I was really scared. I mean how could I hide any of this and so I grit my teeth and I put my suitcase on the belt and I was lucky and that mean because how could I have explained it. I'm supposedly going on a vacation and all I have is this equipment. I don't even have a bathing suit with me and then when I got to the other side in the symbol people said to me just how lucky I was because it really could have been bad. Can you describe how your students transformed and what level of resistance was there even just cultural resistance to the military dictates, Pavel. My students really weren't able to

20:14protest in any way. It's in a small city in Russia that's just impossible because the consequences are too great. There are too many people who will report on you. I mean if they had done something it's possible that someone in the city or even one of the teachers would have submitted a complaint against them and it just the stakes were too high so they couldn't protest. I'll say one thing that I learned about how propaganda can work by watching hundreds of hours of Russian state propaganda as part of the editing process of this film you know in Karabakh you very rarely see anyone parrot the propaganda back. Very few people seem to believe in the propaganda and the propaganda that's taught doesn't seem to even be designed to convince people of its truth. Rather it seems to be designed to beat you down and it seems to be designed to make you repeat ridiculous things so many times that you just become cynical. I learned that propaganda can be about making you cynical

21:20more than it can be about making you believe one thing or the other. So what you see on Karabakh isn't so much I believe in the war or Putin is great. No what you see is is kind of very very cynical takes like there will always be war or boys are always going to go off and die or there will always be suffering in the world or even ironic detachment like postmodern ironic detachment. That appears to be the end result of Russian propaganda and that seems to be quite effective. And finally Pasha the effect on the kids and on the teachers and the other staff losing their boyfriends their brothers some of the students themselves going off to war the mother losing her son in this plaintiff cry and the cemetery that you amazingly recorded.

22:20Propaganda has a big effect and the most important thing is that it makes us feel like we're alone that everybody around supports the war and that we don't have any ability to resist or protest. But I have to say that when news of this film has come out when people have have seen it I've been getting so much commentary and response from Russia but also from Karabakh where people are saying that you know we've kind of pulled aside the curtain and people see that there are a lot of us and and we're actually not alone. And the mom of my friend our show whose funeral we hear the the audio of in the film she wrote

23:31me on what's happened she said thank you Pasha you understood everything. I want to end by asking David about the BAFTA controversy that's brewing even as we speak today you won a major award there a BAFTA which is the equivalent of the Oscar the British ceremony on Sunday night then the BBC ran the ceremony a few hours later and though they took out one of the filmmaker award-winning filmmakers comments when he said free Palestine when a man with Tourette's on whom a film was based shouted the N word as Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were up on the stage they didn't beep that out the way they took out free Palestine as an award winner yourself your thoughts on what took place.

24:33Well I have to say I also in my speech compared the importance of resistance in Russia to the importance of resistance in Minneapolis and that was also taken out of the broadcast so it seems that a lot of the political speeches were taken out of the broadcast and yeah for me that is indicative of a media ecosystem where people are afraid people are afraid of political documentaries right now very few political documentaries are being picked up by the big corporate players and right now in order to get out your political statement whether it's a statement in a speech or a statement in a story you have to work really really hard you have to get a grassroots movement behind you you have to be hitting the road for years like we have with this film and it's a tough road and I think the only thing that will really get us out of it is a resurgence of public funding

25:33and that's something I think that's really worth fighting for. I will say at the end of the day this film wouldn't exist without support from public institutions. David Borenstein and Pasha Tlanken I thank you for being with us they are the directors of the Oscar nominated documentary Mr. Nobody against Putin. Thank you so much for being with us I made me good then thanks for joining us