“He violated children's rights.” Russia's reaction after “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” took the Oscar
A Russian human rights committee on Wednesday accused the documentary “Mr Nobody against Putin”, awarded on Sunday at the Oscars, of using images of minors without the consent of their parents, this being the first official reaction to the film denouncing the indoctrination of students in Russia, reports AFP.
Pavel Talankine, an animator and videographer in a school in the small Ural city of Karabakh, officially filmed the increasingly intense propaganda applied to students by the Russian authorities since the large-scale offensive launched in Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Opposing this war, he fled Russia in the summer of 2024, taking with him the hard drives containing these videos. The footage is the basis of the 90-minute film, co-directed by Talankine and American director David Borenstein, which received the Academy Award for Best Documentary. It was also named Best Documentary at the 2026 BAFTA Awards announced in February.
Why the Russians accuse the documentary “Mr Nobody against Putin”
Russia's presidential human rights council, an advisory body, said on Telegram on Wednesday that it had written to the Oscars' organizing committee and UNESCO's director-general to ask the American Film Academy “to examine whether this work complies with the ethical and legal norms applied by the Academy in awarding its awards.”
According to this court, “the use of the images of minors was carried out without obtaining the consent of the parents or other legal representatives of the children and without taking into account the limited nature of the use of this type of material, originally registered in an educational environment”.
It also states that the parents and legal representatives of the minors who appear in the film “have notified the competent authorities of the Russian Federation to protect the rights of their children.”
Asked about this documentary, the Kremlin has repeatedly avoided answering. “I have not seen this film,” Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov reacted on Monday.
The film does not even appear on the list of Oscar winners published on Sunday by the Russian state news agency Ria Novosti.
