Dinner in the classroom, Mr Nobody Against Putin (2025)
“I love my job, but I will not be a pawn of the regime.” Pavel Talankin filmed quotas of patriotic classes and activities and their effects, sent them abroad and is now a political exile.
A teacher at a primary school in a small industrial town in the Urals has become one of the most visible faces in recent days denouncing the Kremlin’s new propaganda machine inside the classrooms.
At 34 years old, Pavel Talankin filmed events and extracurricular activities at School No. 1 in Karabash to later co-direct, a documentary that recently won best documentary and which appears among the titles identified as strong candidates for this year’s Oscar. It also won an award at Sundance the year before.
In its native Russia, however, the film continues to be treated as if it didn’t exist. The educational establishment where most of the images were captured is silent, notes , who spoke with the award-winning director.
International coverage penetrated the Kremlin’s strongholds, despite censorship. Students appearing on screen would have been able to watch through hacked copies, viewed privately on cell phones and laptops.
“I hope this helps these kids in the future understand that they were the victims of all of this,” says Talankin. “This film is mainly aimed at Russians, showing them what is happening inside their schools right now.”
Mr Nobody Against Putin follows, over the course of approximately two and a half years, the implementation of a “patriotic education” program imposed by the Russian state, aimed at molding primary school children into supporters of President Vladimir Putin and the .
Contrary to what one might think, the documentary was not filmed secretly: Talankin would have filmed the process out of professional obligation, as schools were called upon to regularly record and upload evidence on official platforms, demonstrating that they were fulfilling quotas for classes and patriotic activities defined by the Ministry of Education.
Then, in secret, the professor sent material abroad, to the North American director David Borensteinwho worked on the editing and narrative construction of the film.
The images show teachers reading official scripts and students trying to understand concepts that are foreign to them. At first, the children appear obedient and somewhat apathetic, without much connection to the political content. Even before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, they line up to sing optimistic songs about “sun and sky”. Months later, the atmosphere changes: students are confused while listening to speeches about the objectives of the Russian military operation, “denazification”, “demilitarization”.
The corridors begin to echo with the sound of marches: children walk in formation, backs straight, arms synchronized. They receive visits from representatives of the mercenary group who teach them how to identify mines and how to move to avoid amputations. There are even grenade throwing contests.
“We shouldn’t kill them [aos ucranianos] out of hate, we must kill them out of love for our own children” is one of the propaganda phrases cited by Talankin in the NYT interview.
In the director’s view, the government is deliberately building a generation aligned with Putin’s policies, and the documentary aims to raise awareness of what could happen when these children leave the education system in 10 to 15 years: “a new generation of pro-Putin loyalists” will have already been formed.
In an extraordinary meeting of teachers, included in the documentary, teachers discuss the break of notes and they question whether the problem is related to the time taken away from conventional subjects to accommodate the new patriotism sessions. The director explains: if she stopped providing that content, she would be removed from her position. “It’s impossible to get into Russian schools with a camera, so being able to hear her say that makes this the most important scene in the film, in my opinion,” says Talankin.
Talankin says he has received messages of gratitude from people who say they had not understood before what was being taught to the children. But he also received threats: some parents wrote that “they would break his knees” if they ever saw him again.
Escape and exile
When local officials realized the work was being seen in Karabash, agents from the FSB, the internal security service, went to the school to interrogate teachers and administration. According to Talankin, the The order given was that the film “did not exist” and no one should comment on it.
Plunder ended up running away from Russia to avoid arrest. If the sending of images abroad had been discovered, he could have faced a life sentence in the country. In 2024, the day after her graduation ceremony, she told her mother, who is the school librarian, and classmates and friends that she would be vacationing in Turkey for a week. He took with him a suitcase with copies of the recordings and left the country fearing that his luggage would be searched.
Today, he lives in exile and has managed political asylum in Europeaccepting that he will hardly be able to return home. But he says that “it is better to talk about problems than to remain silent”.
