Mr Nobody Against Putin won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature on Sunday. Democracy Now! recently spoke with co-director David Borenstein and the subject of the film, the Russian teacher Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, who personally documented Russia’s use of wartime propaganda. “I need for as many people as possible to see what is happening inside of Russian schools,” says Talankin. “Putin is forcing propaganda into their schools, and [the children are] absorbing all of this.”
Borenstein says the film is also a reflection on “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.”
