Teacher of Oscar-winning Russian filmmaker behind ‘Mr. Nobody Against Putin’ calls him a traitor

By Jekaterina Golubkova

Aug 27 (Reuters) – Pavel Talankin, who filmed how one Russian school tried to justify the war in Ukraine to its students in a clandestine project for the Oscar-winning “Mr. ​Nobody Against Putin”, was guilty of treachery, his former teacher ‌told Russian state TV.

The documentary, by Talankin and David Borenstein, was based on two years of footage that Talankin recorded at a school where he was employed in the Chelyabinsk region, some 1,500 km (930 miles) southeast of Moscow.

Banned by the ‌Russian ​authorities, the documentary shows how the school changed ⁠after Moscow sent its ⁠troops into Ukraine in 2022 and how some of the teachers — via history lessons and activities such as newly introduced patriotic hours — justified the war and sought to instil patriotism.

Talankin, who fled Russia ​in 2024, has said it was important to tell the world how Russian school children were being indoctrinated. He has defended the ⁠film as a record for posterity to ⁠show how “an entire generation became angry and aggressive”.

But in ​an interview with TV programme Vesti, Nina Zabugornova, whom the broadcaster described ​as Talankin’s first teacher in his hometown of Karabash, also ‌in the Chelyabinsk region, said he was an ordinary boy not much different from others.

“I wanted to watch the documentary, to see what did Pashka film,” said Zabugornova, standing in front of an Orthodox church ⁠in Karabash, where she is a bell-ringer.

“But it turned out that Pashka had decided to turn his back on his motherland. Isn’t that a betrayal? ⁠Isn’t that an ‌evil?”

In March, Russia designated Talankin, who fled the ⁠country in 2024, as a foreign agent. Those given ​the ‌label are subject to exacting bureaucratic requirements.

Zabugornova, who she ​said was ⁠a teacher for four decades, blamed herself that Talankin had committed “a betrayal”.

“So I think that when he was little, when all these things were being formed in him, I must have overlooked something somewhere, didn’t give him enough good lessons,” she told Vesti.

(Reporting by Jekaterīna Golubkova in TokyoEditing ​by Barbara lewis)