LOS ANGELES, March 15 (Reuters) – “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” about a young Russian schoolteacher waging quiet resistance against Russia’s war on Ukraine, won the Oscar for best documentary feature on Sunday.
“Mr. Nobody Against Putin” is about how you lose your country, and what we saw when working with this footage is that you lose it through countless small, little acts of complicity,” director David Borenstein said on stage alongside co-director Pavel Talankin.
“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 media and control how we produce it,” he added.
The film, created by Borenstein and Talankin, uses two years of footage shot by Talankin to show how the Russian state indoctrinates students with pro-war messages. The videographer documents his own persecution and eventual exile in the film, which The Hollywood Reporter called a “touching, intimate chronicle.”
The other documentary feature nominees this year were “Cutting Through Rocks,” “The Perfect Neighbor,” “The Alabama Solution,” and “Come See Me in the Good Light.”
(Reporting by Danielle Broadway; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Howard Goller)
