Mr. Nobody Against Putin

Danish documentarian David Borenstein (Dream Empire) shapes the footage of a determined teacher and A/V guy, Pavel Talankin, working at a primary school in one of Russia's poorest, most polluted mining towns during the year Vladimir Putin launches his full-scale invasion of Ukraine and restarts Soviet-style militarization and indoctrination practices in schools across the country. Talankin's warm, rebellious personality comes across well, even if his footage is as banal as a communist training film. There are many tracking shots from Talankin's camera as he walks the halls of the school and the roads of his town. These are the type of empty, generic shots that video guys have been in love with ever since we figured out how to stabilize our images while walking.

Talankin is contacted by a media outlet outside of Russia and agrees to become the type of "enemy agent working from within to undermine the motherland" that Putin's propaganda warns the students about. The irony is that Talankin is working undercover in plain sight: he is the videographer assigned to film the teachers who are forced to read these lessons to their students every day, but he doesn't just upload these videos to a government website; he stores them on hard drives to show to the rest of the world. It is a heroic and commendable act. Still, it's not exactly eye-opening to see what Putin is doing to the Russian education system. It's exactly what you'd think it is, and essentially what Trump and many Republicans want education in this country to look like. There are a few victims and villains who start to come to life in this movie, but they never really become characters. Mr. Nobody Against Putin is more one man's oral history, illustrated with footage he bravely smuggled out of the country, than a documentary feature.