Russian film Mr Nobody Against Putin nominated for Best Documentary Oscar

A documentary highlighting the extent to which state propaganda has taken hold in Russian schools has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film, the Academy announced on Thursday.

The footage used in the documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin was shot over two years by Pavel Talankin, an events coordinator and videographer at a high school in Karabash, a heavily polluted town in the Russian Urals.  

Though Talankin was required to film “patriotic” events, school plays and parades as part of his job, he also did so in an effort to document the growth of ultranationalist and pro-war propaganda within the Russian school system since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. 

After leaving Russia, Talankin shared his footage with American film director David Borenstein, who made the documentary. The film premiered at the Sundance film festival in January 2025, where it won the world cinema documentary special jury award. 

Over the course of Borenstein’s film, Russian flags appear with greater frequency around the school, assembly time becomes an exercise in pledging allegiance to the fatherland and European history is increasingly distorted in a bid to teach pupils that Ukraine has been taken over by neo-Nazis.

In other good news for Russian filmmakers, Three Sisters, a cartoon by St. Petersburg animator Konstantin Bronzit, was nominated in the Best Animated Short Film category, making it Bronzit’s third Oscar nomination. The 98th Academy Awards will be held in Los Angeles on 15 March.