After Mr. Nobody Against Putin won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature Film on Oscars night, director David Borenstein made some subtle parallels between Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America in his acceptance speech. Backstage, Borenstein elaborated a little further.
“One interesting thing about working with a team of Russians throughout this process has been my desire as an American to constantly compare the situation in America to Russia,” says Borenstein. “But a lot of my Russian colleagues and friends always said, ‘No, no, it’s not the same situation. It’s actually happening quicker in America than it’s been happening in Russia.’ Trump is moving a lot quicker than Putin in his early years.”
Mr. Nobody Against Putin follows teacher Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, a teacher in a remote Russian town that refused to go along with Putin’s mandate to teach anti-Ukraine lessons.
“Mr. Nobody Against Putin is about how you lose your country. And what we saw when working with this footage, it’s that you lose it through countless small little acts of complicity,” Borenstein said on stage. “When we act complicit, when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities, when we don’t say anything, when oligarchs take over the media and control how we can produce it and consume, we all face a moral choice. But luckily, even a ‘nobody’ is more powerful than you think.”
Backstage, Talankin also spoke about one of the most dangerous moments in the filmmaking process. “The most dangerous moment… in the process of making the film was that when I left and tried to cross the border of Russia and leave with all of the hard drives and materials,” he says. “Russia is the government where, when you leave, they can search all of your belongings. They can look to everything I had, all of your correspondence, everything.”
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