“Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” which takes on the Russian leader’s propaganda and patriotism program for the nation’s youth after its invasion of Ukraine, won the Oscar for best documentary feature Sunday.
“In the name of our future, in the name of all of our children, stop all of these wars now,” the film’s protagonist and co-director Pavel Talankin said in Russian from the stage through a translator.
Talankin was a teacher and activities director in a small-town school in Russia who captured his students’ lessons, chants and songs promoting the war in Ukraine on video. He smuggled his hard drives out of the country to collaborate with American director David Borenstein, who lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.
The two men gave the night some of its most overtly political moments during their speeches. Borenstein spoke broadly about nations tipping into totalitarianism, while clearly emphasizing similarities between his country and Talankin’s.
“’Mr. Nobody Against Putin’ is about how you lose your country,” Borenstein said. “You lose it through countless small little acts of complicity.”
Cheers in the auditorium grew as Borenstein said you lose a country when “we don’t say anything” when governments kill people in the streets and oligarchs seek to consolidate control over media outlets.
“We all face a moral choice, but luckily even a nobody is more powerful than you think,” Borenstein said.
The war in Ukraine has loomed large in Oscar documentary categories since it began. The Associated Press’ documentary “20 Days in Mariupol” won best documentary feature in 2024. This year’s documentary short nominees included “Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud,” about an American journalist killed in the war.
“Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” distributed by Apple TV, premiered at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. Its tone is light and almost mischievously comical at times, with Talankin at moments resembling his fellow Oscar winner Michael Moore. It was the first Oscar for both Borenstein and Talankin.
The film won the British Academy Film Award during the Oscar run-up. But the win was still something of an upset over “The Perfect Neighbor” — director Geeta Gandbhir’s Netflix film built almost entirely from police body camera footage — which most media prognosticators picked as the winner.
The other competition in the category came from “The Alabama Solution,” “Cutting Through Rocks” and “Come See Me in the Good Light.”
The Oscar for documentary short went to “All the Empty Rooms,” which chronicles broadcast journalist Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp’s attempts to memorialize the bedrooms of children killed in mass shootings.
The winners, director Joshua Seftel and producer Conall Jones, turned their brief acceptance time over to the mother of Jackie Cazares, one of the children at the center of the film.
“My daughter Jackie was 9 years old when she was killed in Uvalde. Since that day, her bedroom has been frozen in time,” Gloria Cazares said from the stage. “We believe that if the world could see their empty bedrooms, we’d see a different America.”
