(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
If you watch one documentary this year, it should be Mr Nobody Against Putin. Pavel Talankin's deeply moving – and disturbing – account of how Russian schools and the Russiane society succumbed to Putins military death cult as soon as the invasion of Ukraine was initiated in February 2022 – is both touching and heartbreaking.
Russia's most polluted city
Pavel – as his friends call him “Pasha” – is a 33-year-old teaching assistant at a school in the small town of Karabash in the Urals, known as Russia’s most polluted city, where copper mining waste has turned the surrounding hills black and toxic gases leak from rusty pipes into the streets.
But for Pasha, a self-proclaimed loner who has always felt like an outsider in Karabash, although he is beloved by his students, the city is a place of love and romance. For him, the tired, gray and stained five-story Soviet Khrushchevkas that house the city's residents are places of beauty – with the tangled pipelines of the copper mines, visions of beauty under the crisp, azure winter skies, when temperatures can drop to minus 40 degrees Celsius.
He may be an odd loner, but his job as a videographer tasked with filming all academic, student-related, and social events at the school he attended (and where his plump, slightly grumpy, but lovable mother works as a librarian) places him at the center of a small community where students flock to his small office, a place he calls a haven of democracy in a country that has gone mad.
Pasha's work – and his obsession with recording everything on tape, even his own admissions about lonely evenings in the two-room apartment he shares with his dog Nebraska and around 400 carefully color-coded books – forms the basis for a stunning directorial debut, shaped and supported by Copenhagen-based American documentarian, director and screenwriter David Borenstein.
Via a request on social media for someone willing to reveal militarizerThe gene of Russian education in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine – this is developing into a risky but purposeful project to do something to expose the wave of hatred that is embracing Russian society. All the while Putin's propaganda creates a victim complex in a country whose army brings unimaginable misery and violence to its neighbor.
Collective madness
Pasha's gradual awakening to the horror of living in a society descending into collective madness – all under the guise of Soviet patriotism – is woven into his everyday recording of teachingshoals where teachers are asked to read prepared texts accusing Ukrainian “neo-Nazis” of threatening Russia. And where a gray-faced history teacher mentions Lavrenty Beria – Stalin’s murderous head of the secret police – as one of his favorite historical figures.
If you watch one documentary this year, it should be Mr Nobody Against Putin.
He forges deep emotional bonds with many of his students. His fellow teachers tolerate his idiosyncrasies—like overlooking the fact that one morning at school assembly he played Lady Gaga's Biden inauguration rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner" instead of the required Russian anthem "Glinka." Also, that he gets away with a little forefinger when removing sticky notes with Z-symbol on the school windows to replace them with Xs, which is an online code for support for Ukraine – reflects Pasha’s perception of Karabash as a fundamentally decent place.
But as government interference in the curriculum increases at a rapid pace – with teaching in grenade throwing and weapon identification, visits by mercenaries from Wagner groups and the creation of a new patriotic youth movement in the style of Young Pioneers – Pasha feels forced to quit his job.
It is only then that he is contacted by Borenstein's team – who have somehow learned that he is willing to expose the militaristic turn in Russian politics. utdanning – that Pasha finds a new purpose. He withdraws his resignation and commits himself to meticulously documenting what happens when totalitarianism and its usual death cult grip a nation.
He removes stickers with the Z symbol on the school windows to replace them with Xs, which are a web code for support for Ukraine
Life in Karabash is getting worse, with young men being drafted, sent to the front, and often returning in coffins. The funeral scene of Pasha's friend Artyom – now too dangerous to film – is made all the more poignant and terrifying by the soundtrack that highlights the terrible wails of a grieving mother.
Another side of Russia
Finally, the time has come for Pasha to leave Russia for his own safety, and he makes a bold departure that reveals the quiet courage of a man with a conscience.
This is a sensitive, honest and beautifully filmed film. Pasha acknowledges that his suffering and the suffering of his friends, who lost loved ones in the war, cannot be compared to that of the Ukrainians. But the fact that he shows another side of Russia – that of people who experienced freedom for three short decades – rather than the hatred that Putin preaches – makes this an important film that is both a glimmer of light in a dark time and an important document for future historians.
