19 March 2026
by Sergei Medvedev
Source: Facebook [originally published as: Sergej Medveděv ‘Zlo může mít i tvář maminky. Pan Nikdo dostal Oscara po právu, píše ruský historik,’ Idnes, 19 March 2026]
If you want to set Russians at odds, give them an Oscar. The film Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, has sparked a slew of conflicting reactions in Russia. Although this is nominally not a Russian film, but rather a Danish-Czech co-production with an American screenwriter, its protagonist, co-director, and cinematographer is Pavel Talankin, a Russian, who shot it at home in the Ural Mountains — and the film is Russian in both origin and content. The Kremlin tried to ignore it, although Russian propaganda outlets came up with a couple gems when describing it, such as ‘Film about Putin gets an Oscar’ and ‘Film about changes in a Russian school during the age of the Special Military Operation’. The Russian opposition was also divided. Some thought the film too simplistic and propagandistic; others found it to be a ‘festival film’ made for foreign audiences; others were outraged at the use of footage of children; and others still were bothered by the lack of war footage.
Separately, there are critical voices from Ukraine who find any film from Russia or about Russia unacceptable. This is understandable, given that Russia is communicating with them via rockets, not the cinema. For Ukrainians, Russian Paralympians’ medals in Milan, the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and an Oscar for a film by a Russian director are all part of the same phenomenon. For them, the defining film of 2025 was 2,000 Meters to Andreyevka, a Ukrainian documentary made by Mstislav Chernov, who followed a Ukrainian platoon with a camera as they carried out a mission to liberate a village occupied by Russia. The film won the award for Best Director at the Sundance Film Festival.
Mr. Nobody is also about the war but does not show it directly. That is precisely what makes it a striking testament to the era and a powerful artistic statement. It does not feature Ukrainian cities in ruins or the grief of Ukrainian families; it does not show the blood and filth of the trenches; and it does not contain tragic stories of refugees, curses against Putin, or the thirst for revenge. But it does have something that’s no less frightening: the mundane evil of the everyday.
We are shown the peaceful Ural town of Karabash, home to a copper smelting plant. One of thousands of industrial ‘mono-towns’ in Russia, it is the heartland of the Ural mountains and a base model of Russian society. The city is far from poor. One of the characters in the film, history teacher Pavel Abdulmanov, a United Russia activist and fierce war propagandist, is given a new apartment by the copper smelting plant. The school is also clearly hardly struggling — it has well-equipped classrooms, computers, and even its own video production. In fact, the main character works as a videographer for the school, gradually transforming from a passive cameraman into a secret director of what will become the film. We see his students, inquisitive and endearing; his mother, who works in the school library and repairs old books; and his colleagues, weary women exhausted by their teaching workloads and constant paperwork. And we see how this familiar school life, with its history lessons, assemblies, artwork, and conversations among students — drop by drop, cell by cell, like a cancerous tumor — breeds an ordinary fascism.
This film is a document that condemns; it is an indictment. It is itself the very ‘banality of evil’ that Hannah Arendt wrote about: its genesis, history, and inner workings. Here, the bearer of evil turns out to be a beloved mother, who categorically states that ‘to shoot and kill are in a man’s nature’; it is fellow teachers who fret over school assemblies; it is the sticker with Putin’s portrait on a student’s guitar; it is the hushed children passing around models of land mines that Wagner fighters brought to class; and it is the fair-haired boy of about ten cheerfully taking aim with a sniper rifle. The evil in this film is not explicitly named, but it spreads into every scene, every shot, like a metastasising cancer. It springs up from the bleak industrial landscape of five-story apartment blocks, slag heaps, the factory’s smokestacks. And suddenly, Pasha’s former students are gathering to send off a friend who is going to war. They drink and embrace, swearing their eternal friendship and calling him a ‘real man’. Then come the first death notices to Karabash; one of Pasha’s students loses a brother at the front. Then comes Cargo 200, with the bodies of the school’s graduates. In the burial scene (which wasn’t filmed for ethical reasons, but audio was recorded) the mother of one of the children killed cries out over a coffin, ‘Artyom, Artyooom!’
The well-known Russian educator and public intellectual Dima Zitser, who has left Russia and founded a school in Estonia, often says in his talks that those most vulnerable to propaganda are preschoolers and primary school students, because they fully trust adults. Indeed, the film shows how attentively the students listen to the history teacher’s patriotic speeches. Moreover, sociologists and volunteers have been reporting on a new trend, wherein 18-year-olds are going to war — many of them from small towns and villages like Karabash, sometimes from perfectly happy families — behind their mothers’ and grandmothers’ backs, only telling them on the eve of their deployment, or even after they’re already gone. They leave to become one of those ‘real men’, or simply a hero, just as they were taught by their school propaganda and the ‘special military operation veterans’ who visited their classes with their helmets, body armor, and automatic weapons. These 18-year-old soldiers don’t live long and often perish after their first combat mission. The lists of those missing in action include quite a few soldiers born in 2007.
Is there a way out of this quagmire? There is — and it’s the path taken by the film’s protagonist, Pavel Talankin. Gentle and timid, he is the most unlikely hero of the opposition. He’s a typical Mr. Nobody, living nowhere, in the heart of provincial Russia. But in his heart grows an awareness of an unfolding evil, and he makes his moral choice, transforming from a simple school videographer into a secret film director documenting one school’s moral decay. It’s a dangerous choice, one that carries the risk of arrest, torture, and imprisonment (what Pavel is doing qualifies, at the very least, as ‘spreading fake news’, if not treason) and ultimately leads to his flight from Russia. Within this seemingly weak character lies an iron will to reject evil, and this is another driving force of the plot.
The film’s dramatic structure is built on these contrasts: a quiet school life — and the toxicity of the evil ripening in it; an awkward and shy character — and the will to protest buried within him. Mr. Nobody fully deserved the Oscar, not because of the current political climate, but because of its artistic virtues and genuine sincerity of tone (even despite a handful of staged scenes). And most importantly, because of its clear ethical message: evil does not necessarily look like evil. It does not always come on a tank emblazoned with a Z, or on the cloven hooves of Putin’s high heels. Evil can also take the shape of a loving mother, a first teacher, a best friend, or the streets in your hometown in the spring — and that only makes it more frightening. This is evidence of the decay of Russian society and the corruption of children, no less repulsive than the paedophiles in the Epstein files: ‘But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.’
And at the same time, this is a cautionary film. The problem isn’t Putin, it’s the simple and kind Russian people from industrial towns in the Urals, who have accepted this war without question, made it their own ‘domestic’ war, and are now raising children with this belief — nice children with close-cropped hair, who will grow up, sign military contracts, and become killers, whether as part of mobilization or voluntarily, because of some romantic feelings or patriotism, or just for the money. Putin will die sooner or later, but these people will remain — and no film, not even one with an Oscar, can tell us what to do about that.
Translated by Nina dePalma
