Mr. Nobody Against Putin - 1 Nomination

 

• Best Documentary Feature: Helle Faber, Alzbeta Karaskova, Pavel Talankin, David Borenstein

Victor Abakumov is a beloved teacher in a small town in Russia. The kids hang out in his office. The “weirdos” find their place and their voice with him. He is one of those teachers who goes the extra mile because he genuinely loves what he does and the children under his care. But he is not a fan of Putin’s and proudly hangs the flag of resistance in his office. When his job is slowly taken over by near constant filming of teachers and uploading them so that the state can make sure that teachers are teaching a pro-Russian curriculum (obviously full of insane revisionist history), he becomes more and more disillusioned and in more and more personal danger. He volunteers to discreetly smuggle all of his footage of the propagandizing out to journalists in England, and that is primarily how this footage becomes a documentary film. Along the way, he sets up personal testimonies about loving Russia but hating the war, hating the administration and Putin, and dearly hoping that someone will come along to intervene, and hoping that the children he cared so much about will stop being recruited to fight and die in the Ukranian war. (In America, I guess some people would call that, “love it or leave it” though so far in this country, we are rarely jailed and murdered by the state for having opposing views.)

We can see this teacher’s heart breaking as he gets deeper and deeper and clearer and clearer that his only path forward is out. It is an edge of your seat movie, but also so emotional and raw, and frankly, just a bit on the scary side as we see what happens at the endpoint of authoritarianism. Instructive on multiple levels if the brain can accept any form of nuance, and perhaps a must see for a lesson in how those who dabble as authoritarians ultimately become when they succeed.