‘Mr. Nobody Against Putin’ wins best documentary feature Oscar for teacher who opposed Ukraine war

Talankin was a teacher and activities director in a small-town school in Russia who captured on video his students' lessons, chants and songs promoting the war in Ukraine. He smuggled his hard drives out of the country to collaborate with American director David Borenstein, who lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The two men gave the night some of its most overtly political moments during their speeches. Talankin said backstage that his students helped him write his. Borenstein spoke broadly about nations tipping into totalitarianism, while clearly emphasizing similarities between his country and Talankin's.

“'Mr. Nobody Against Putin' is about how you lose your country,” Borenstein said. “You lose it through countless small little acts of complicity.”

Cheers in the auditorium grew as Borenstein said you lose a country when “we don’t say anything” when governments kill people in the streets and oligarchs seek to consolidate control over media outlets.

“We all face a moral choice, but luckily even a nobody is more powerful than you think,” Borenstein said.

The war in Ukraine has loomed large in Oscar documentary categories since its beginning in 2022. The Associated Press' documentary “20 Days in Mariupol” won best documentary feature in 2024. This year’s documentary short nominees included “Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud,” about an American journalist killed in the war.

“Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” distributed by Apple TV, premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival. Its tone is light and almost mischievously comical at times, with Talankin sometimes resembling his fellow documentary Oscar winner Michael Moore. It was the first Oscar for both Borenstein and Talankin.

The film won the British Academy Film Award during the Oscar run-up. But the Oscar win was still something of an upset over “The Perfect Neighbor” — director Geeta Gandbhir’s Netflix film built almost entirely from police body camera footage — which most media prognosticators picked as the winner.

The other competition in the category came from “The Alabama Solution,” “Cutting Through Rocks” and “Come See Me in the Good Light.”

The Oscar for documentary short went to “All the Empty Rooms,” which chronicles broadcast journalist Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp's attempts to memorialize the bedrooms of children killed in mass shootings.

The winners, director Joshua Seftel and producer Conall Jones, turned their brief acceptance time over to the mother of Jacklyn Cazares, memorialized by the film.

“My daughter Jackie was 9 years old when she was killed in Uvalde. Since that day, her bedroom has been frozen in time,” Gloria Cazares said from the stage. “We believe that if the world could see their empty bedrooms, we’d see a different America.”