“Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” which has its world premiere on Saturday in the World Cinema Documentary Competition section of the Sundance Film Festival, delivers an insider’s view of the impact of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine on the lives of Russia’s children. Variety spoke to the film’s director, David Borenstein, who worked alongside Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, the subject of the film and its co-director. The trailer is shown below.
The genesis for the project came when Pasha, a high-school teacher in a provincial town in Russia, responded to a request from a web content company for people to explain how the “special military operation” in Ukraine, as they call the invasion in Russia, had impacted their jobs.
“Pasha responded to it with a passionate, political diatribe, talking about how his job had been turned upside down, how he’s been turned into a propagandist, and how his school, almost seemingly overnight, was turned into something that he didn’t recognize anymore,” Borenstein explains.
The web content company declined to pursue the matter but by a twist of fate Pasha’s response ended up in the hands of Borenstein, who is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, but worked in China for many years. Pasha, who worked as his school’s videographer, was able to film inside the school as it introduced various government mandated measures to amp up the patriotism of its students.
Borenstein says it was “extraordinarily difficult communicating” with Pasha as he proceeded with the project as the consequences for him, if he were discovered, would have been brutal.
“Mr. Nobody Against Putin”
Courtesy of Pavel Talankin
“It was probably about as big of a communicative blindfold that you could have in a collaborative project,” Borenstein says. “We couldn’t talk through any means of communication other than a super encrypted line, and in the beginning, we got a security consultant to create some ground rules, and some of these ground rules also considered whether his phone would be compromised. We couldn’t be certain if, even on the encrypted line, we could speak openly, so we’re still speaking in code words and indirectly on this encrypted line. We had a lot of great conversations in the beginning, getting to know each other, but talking about the project was always a huge challenge.”
Within such limitations, Borenstein did what he could to guide Pasha as the project progressed, but the personality of the Russian teacher was also a factor. “He’s this wild, beautiful man that cannot really be guided when he picks up a camera,” Borenstein says. “It’s usually because he’s feeling very profound emotions, and it’s his way of dealing with it. He says it in the film that the psychology or the state that he’s in living under this regime, it’s like walking on a tightrope. Sometimes he feels like he’s just so guilty about being a propagandist that he just has to lash out and do something and picking up the camera was one way of doing that.
“Mr. Nobody Against Putin”
Courtesy of Pavel Talankin
“So often he picks up the camera because he’s feeling really emotional, although other times it is because he’s just kind of capturing daily life and joking around, but for Pasha it was really hard in the beginning. I thought maybe I can give him some direction, and he could benefit from my experience directing scenes. And quickly I found out that’s not going to happen. I have to approach his footage on his terms, which actually ended up feeling way better, because there was so much quality to his footage, like I said, how the very act of filming were related to deep, deep emotions and psychological pressures that could be explored through the use of voiceover, the extent to which he’s been just filming in that school for years, and people are so used to him that way. He just walks down the halls and just shooting shit with people. That footage captures this flux of daily life in the institution that was really something remarkable.
“I was in the edit room watching it. It was just such a natural and fluid way of entering that school that when looking at the footage over several years, it really revealed the extent of that slow creep of fascism and militarization in the school in a way that would be difficult to capture any other way.
“So, for me, the collaboration was about accepting him for who he is, and loving that and then figuring out how I could work with that. It was about saying, this is the collaboration, it’s this: I’m a filmmaker in Denmark; he is a teacher and videographer at [a high school in the Ural Mountains]. We are making a film together. That was the framework, and then the film was just answers to the thousands of challenges that were presented as a result of that.”
A number of themes emerge during the film, but these were not evident as Pasha was filming. “Pretty much everything was discovered in the edit, because he films not in a very focused way. He didn’t film characters, really. He filmed everybody. And so, it’s not like he said, ‘Oh, I’ve been following Masha and Pavel.’ No, he just followed everybody. And so, reality had to be ordered in some way that made sense, and that occurred through the edit.
“So, I’m finding characters, I’m looking at different themes in the propaganda. I’m looking at patterns in how the school was changing over those years. I’m looking at how the vibe and how the emotions of the students and the people around him were transforming in the wake of what was happening. And it was a very, very slow and difficult process, because it wasn’t just hundreds of hours of footage, it was more than that.”
There are certain key relationships portrayed in the film, the most obvious being between Pasha and his mother. But there are others – such as his relationship with Masha, a girl whose brother goes off to fight in the war, and a young man who’s recruited. How did the director decide on those as being the key ones?
“I think it was because all of those characters had some moments that really affected me emotionally in the edit room,” Borenstein says. “Masha is a good example, the girl whose brother goes off to fight. I had kind of overlooked her footage for a long time until it reached its tragic end. I saw footage of her in the cemetery, and it really moved me, and it made me think about the war, and it made me think about the pain that Pasha and she must have felt, and I thought it was important. And then I looked back in this massive archive from years earlier, and after finding that footage, I found, oh, wow, like she was talking with Pasha right when her brother was drafted to join the army. So, it was kind of working backwards, actually.”
Borenstein tried not to present a stereotypical view of Russians as being threatening or unpleasant. Although there’s one teacher who is very much pro-Putin, the rest of them are sympathetically portrayed. “I took the act of collaborating with Pasha very seriously. So, for me, I wanted to order this. I was the director. I wrote it, but he was the co-director, and I wanted his perspective to be firmly and openly and honestly embedded in the way that the story was told. And that meant opening myself up to him and trying to really understand him, understand the way that he sees the school, the way that he sees Russia and I think that helped me avoid an overly black-and-white perspective of what was going on there, trying to understand the way he sees things.
“I really made sure that his perspective is evident – his love for the town, his relationship with people, the way he sees the people there, because he grew up with them. He sees them as people. Making sure that’s included has allowed us to make a film that I’m pretty sure is something that the majority of Russians believe in and agree with. So I think what I’m proud of in this film is the fact that Russians agree with it. It’s hard to make an anti-regime film, as a foreigner, that people in the West say, ‘Yeah, I agree,’ and then people in Russia aren’t rolling their eyes at. I don’t think this is happening here. I think that it avoids a black-and-white representation of the Russian people. That was the goal, enlightening to people here, but also being a powerful rallying call to people in Russia, also because his perspective is so unique. It’s not like he’s a liberal intellectual from Moscow. He’s a teacher. He’s not calling for revolution. He’s not calling for democracy or elections. He’s just looking at the violence that’s entering these schools and saying, ‘That’s wrong,’ and making that perspective front and center in this film, I think, gave us a lot.”
One challenging aspect to the film was dealing with the issues of consent and privacy in terms of him having shot the footage of the children and then it being very difficult, if not impossible, to get their consent. In this, he had the support of the film’s broadcasting partners.
Borenstein says: “The first thing that we did on this project was doing a security review and getting the BBC involved. They were involved at the very beginning, and gave us a lot of guidance when it comes to informing people and getting consent for being in the film. We determined that telling people about this film was obviously a security issue for everybody involved. So, when we did it, we didn’t do it. But after the fact, Pasha has talked to a lot of people, specifically the people who had speaking roles in the film, and they agree with the film, and they’re happy that it’s going on. A big part of this, of course, is making sure that Pacha is the only one in this film that is standing against the regime. There’s a lot of care to make sure that we’re not showing anyone else as anything but law abiding citizens. The responsibility of this film and the kind of agency of this film is entirely on Pasha, who is now out of Russia.”
Borenstein hasn’t seen any attempts by the Russian government to stop the film from being distributed or screened so far, but, “We’re going to keep our eyes open,” he says. “We’re ready for it. It’s a little bit early, but I have noticed that my personal website is like all views from Russia. I’m just wondering what’s going to happen, yeah, but let’s see. We’re ready for some reaction from Russia.”
The film’s producer is Helle Faber at Made in Copenhagen. International sales are handled by DR Sales and Cinetic Media is handling U.S. rights.
The film’s co-producers were PINK, the Danish Film Institute, Czech Film Fund, Nordisk Film & TV Fond, FilmFyn, Fritt ord, Hermod Lannungs Fond, BBC Storyville, DR, ZDF, ARTE, NRK, SVT, RTS, DR Sales, VPRO, UPP and Edithouse Fyn.