When Moscow invaded Ukraine, Pavel Talankin, a staff member at a secondary school in Russia’s Ural Mountains, was ordered to film patriotic lessons, songs and morning drills. Talankin, the school’s event organizer and also a keen videographer, found the propaganda work so depressing that he wanted to quit his job in the industrial town of Karabash. Then he received what he said was the strangest message of his life. A Europe-based filmmaker got in touch, offering to collaborate on a project to document the abrupt militarization of Talankin’s school in the wake of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of its neighbor.
Talankin had earlier seen a post from a Russian company looking for people whose jobs had been affected by the war. Talankin said he was ready to talk. After receiving the foreigner’s offer, Talankin did not sleep all night.
The project changed his life forever. After teaming up with David Borenstein and shooting many hours of footage, Talankin fled Russia last summer with seven hard discs, leaving behind his mother, brothers and sisters and the town he loved. Using the smuggled-out footage, Borenstein, a Denmark-based US filmmaker, directed what became Mr Nobody Against Putin, an award-winning 90-minute documentary which exposes the intensity of the propaganda at Talankin’s school and throughout Karabash. It premiered at this year’s Sundance film festival in January.
Photo: AFP
PERSONA NON GRATA
The project cost Talankin dearly. Local officials banned his former colleagues from contacting him, he became a hate figure for supporters of the war and his school librarian mother was upset.
“I have become a persona non grata,” Talankin, 34, said from Prague, where he is now based.
Photo: AFP
Russia outlawed all criticism of the Russian military and the Kremlin and Talankin knew he had taken huge risks. But he has no regrets. “I would do it all over again.”
He has been buoyed by the support of people featured in the film including those who lost their loved ones in the war. One former colleague said she became ashamed that she, too, was “part of the system.”
The documentary reaped awards at festivals and the film crew hopes it will be available to wider audiences in Europe later this year. Borenstein said the film’s success had been a “relief” because the multinational crew overcame numerous obstacles including communication and security. But above all he was “really scared” that if the film flopped, Talankin’s sacrifice would come to nothing.
“I knew the whole time that Pasha would have to leave Russia to make this project happen,” Borenstein said, referring to his co-director by his diminutive. “That is a huge sacrifice for him, because his mum is there, his whole life is there.”
Talankin has not been able to join the crew to present the film at the Sundance festival in Utah and elsewhere due to paperwork issues, but the team hopes this will soon change.
For now he is learning English and adjusting to his new life in Prague.
HEARTENING REACTIONS
Talankin said he was heartened by the reactions at the screenings.
One viewer in the Czech Republic said he hated Russians but the film made him reconsider.
“We knew nothing about what was happening to you,” Talankin quoted the Czech as saying.
“It is a powerful and poetic piece of cinema,” said producer Alexandra Fechner, who is promoting the film in France.
“This film shows the hidden side of propaganda in Russia, which targets the youngest members of society, children who are being taught a rewritten version of history and given guns,” she said.
With the war in its fourth year, Moscow has put society on a war footing and leveraged the educational system to raise a fiercely pro-Kremlin generation.
The film features Wagner mercenaries telling children about hand grenades and teachers calling Ukrainians “neo-Nazis,” and includes an audio recording of a wailing mother at her soldier son’s funeral.
But critics also point to the documentary’s empathy and light touch. In one episode, a history teacher tells pupils that the spiraling prices could soon make gas unaffordable for Europeans.
“The French will soon be like musketeers, riding horses, and the rest of Europe too,” he said.
Borenstein said that by viewing the footage sent by Talankin nearly every day, he understood the effect of the dehumanizing war-time propaganda.
While at the beginning he found some of the clips shocking, months later his mind had become so used to the onslaught of the propaganda that he did not see the footage depicting the Wagner mercenaries as something abnormal.
“I was able to replicate some of the feelings that maybe the students and people in the school felt,” he said. “Looking at this propaganda every single day was a lesson in how desensitized you can become to it.”
A lot of the footage had not made it into the film, including the school’s preparations for the possibility of a nuclear attack.
Karabash is located close to one of Russia’s most sensitive sites, the Mayak nuclear reprocessing plant.
Talankin said Borenstein did not want the viewers to “drown in the enormous amount of negative material.”
“I have plans for this footage,” Talankin said. “Sooner or later I will start slowly releasing it.”
Last Thursday, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) detected 41 sorties of Chinese aircraft and nine navy vessels around Taiwan over a 24-hour period. “Thirty out of 41 sorties crossed the median line and entered Taiwan’s northern, central, southwestern and eastern ADIZ (air defense identification zones),” it reported. Local media noted that the exercises coincided with the annual Han Kuang military exercises in Taiwan. During the visit of then-US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan in August 2022, the largest number of sorties was on Aug. 5, “involving a total of 47 fighter aircraft and two supporting reconnaissance/patrol aircraft.
Xu Pengcheng looks over his shoulder and, after confirming the coast is clear, helps his crew of urban adventurers climb through the broken window of an abandoned building. Long popular in the West, urban exploration, or “urbex” for short, sees city-dwelling thrill-seekers explore dilapidated, closed-off buildings and areas — often skirting the law in the process. And it is growing in popularity in China, where a years-long property sector crisis has left many cities dotted with empty buildings. Xu, a 29-year-old tech worker from the eastern city of Qingdao, has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers for his photos of rundown schools and
At times, it almost seems that former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is out to sabotage the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). As if on cue, with the recall campaigns against KMT lawmakers in full swing, Ma thought it would be a good time to lead a delegation of students to China and attend the 17th Straits Forum (海峽論壇) and meet with Wang Huning (王滬寧), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo member entrusted by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to be his second in command on Taiwan policy and to run the United Front Work Department (UFWD) in charge of subverting enemies,
There is no politician today more colorful than Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Hsu Chiao-hsin (徐巧芯). The recall vote against her on July 26 will test the limits of her unique style, making it one of the most fascinating to watch. Taiwan has a long history of larger-than-life, controversial and theatrical politicians. As far back as 1988, lawmaker Chu Kao-cheng (朱高正) was the first to brawl and — legend has it — was the first to use the most foul Taiwanese Hokkien curse on the floor of the legislature. Current Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmaker Wang Shih-chien (王世堅) has become famous