The Kremlin propaganda machine sprang into action to vilify an Oscar-winning filmmaker after his documentary put Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian brainwashing of schoolchildren at the center of Hollywood’s biggest awards ceremony earlier this month.
But the film’s director, Pavel Talankin, says Putin’s smear campaign against him is backfiring.
The 36-year-old former teacher, a complete unknown until his film Mr. Nobody Against Putin won an Oscar this month, fled Russia in 2024 after compiling footage for the documentary during his time working as a videographer at a school in Karabash, a town in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region known for its extreme pollution and high mortality rate.
The film—with scenes of schoolchildren being lectured by mercenaries, quizzed on the Kremlin’s talking points, and forced to march and sing patriotic songs—made headlines around the world for capturing the extremes of Putin’s propaganda.
And Talankin very quickly became an enemy of the state back home, where he’s now officially been deemed a “foreign agent” by the justice ministry. With Talankin himself out of the country, state-controlled media has now started hounding his mother, a librarian in the same school where he worked, he said.
“They banged on my mother’s door for half an hour, but she didn’t open,” he told The Daily Beast.
Worse yet, though, was a tacit admission by the Kremlin’s propaganda machine that Talankin’s mother might face “retaliation” for his documentary. The news outlet Life.ru, long known for its murky ties to the security services, ran a hit piece accusing the former teacher of having “sold out” his family and left his mother to “fend for herself,” claiming she is now “very scared that she will be retaliated against for her son.”
Talankin pointed out the telling admission in that claim, noting in comments to the Beast that “Russian propaganda says that I left my family in danger, letting everybody clearly know that there is a dictatorship in the country and confirming that it’s dangerous there.”
Putin’s law enforcers have gone after Talankin in other ways as well. Earlier this month, local prosecutors began to investigate his documentary for supposedly violating children’s rights. The Kremlin’s Human Rights Council, led by Putin himself, complained to the United Nations about the film and called for an investigation into potential human rights violations.
Talankin said Putin’s security services had also been dispatched to Karabash to engage in damage control over the documentary.
“The Federal Security Service arrived in Karabash. Their message to everybody about me and my film was: ‘Nobody’s seen the film, he is gone, he has never been here,’” Talankin said in an exclusive interview with the Daily Beast.
The documentary was a particularly devastating blow for Putin and his underlings after the Kremlin spent years fearmongering over supposed “Russophobia” in the West, only for an unassuming Russian teacher to win recognition in Hollywood for exposing how such propaganda is forced on ordinary Russian citizens. What the Kremlin and its mouthpieces have struggled to grasp–but now might finally be waking up to–is the fact that there are many more Talankins in Russian society, growing increasingly fed up with Putin’s lies.
Just last week, a Kremlin loyalist long known for going after Putin’s critics himself turned on Putin: “Vladimir Putin should resign and be put on trial as a war criminal. His personalized, corrupt system is doomed to collapse, as we’re seeing now with the war in Ukraine and elsewhere,” Ilya Remeslo wrote on Telegram, only to wind up in a psychiatric clinic in St. Petersburg.
Generations of Russians could see what the state’s propaganda was doing to people: The more pressure it put on silencing critics, the more people wanted to know the truth.
“Karabash watched my film. Last month, after Sundance, somebody made a copy of our film and downloaded it on Telegram, so everybody, including the administration, watched it back home and many liked it,” Talankin told The Daily Beast.
Before leaving Russia, he had not been to any big cities. Talankin had lived his entire life in the Ural Mountains, which his film pays tribute to in many ways. He still has many friends and loved ones in Russia, and his family does, too, he said.
“Mom brought a cake to the teachers’ room to celebrate the Oscar,” Talankin said.
He was aware of all the risks he took in making the film, of course, and had seen many arrests before leaving Russia.
“I think it’s cool I got the Oscar and showed my film to the world, I am against the war,” he told The Daily Beast. Now, seeing constant news reports about juvenile crime skyrocketing in Russia, with teenagers beating and killing each other, even attacking pedestrians and teachers, he sighs: “We should be prepared to see a very bad generation of teenagers in the future, and I am sure they understand that at the Kremlin. When I left Russia, they forgot to delete me from the school mailing list and sent me more guidance for teachers, this time about how to identify ‘destructive behavior’ among teenagers. What causes it? Of course, the constant violence that children see on TV from the war in Ukraine.”
Putin’s lesser-known critics have been suffering behind bars for years. According to the human rights group Memorial, the number of Russians locked up for politically motivated reasons increased from 2,662 to 4,884 in 2025.
“Thanks to the video footage that Talankin took out of Russia, the world paid attention to the empire’s aggressive actions against ordinary children; and also proved the fact that Russia is not just one huge war camp – the Kremlin is trying to subdue society, cut the country off the global internet, but it does not work,” Sergey Davidis, a member of Memorial’s board, told The Daily Beast.
“They will continue to label Talankin, and look for other reasons to persecute him and accuse him.”
