Far away in the Urals, he is “Mister Nothing”, a simple educational facilitator at a school, responsible for organizing and filming small events in ordinary Russian school life. Pavel Talkine’s camera has become his weapon against Vladimir Putin. When in February 2022, the head of the Kremlin launched it “special military operations” in Ukraine, he quickly converted classrooms into relay halls to raise patriotic support.
“The day we received instructions from Moscow, from the Ministry of Education, I understood: we will be used as instruments of propaganda. I don’t want to be trapped by this system.”confides Pavel Talkine, met on November 17 at the Saint-André-des-Arts arthouse cinema, in Paris. In the heart of the Latin Quarter, he has just attended the Paris premiere of his documentary Mr. Nothing Against Putin, after a long journey since his flight from Russia in the summer of 2024. He went into exile with, in his luggage, hundreds of hours of video of everything he had recorded in his classroom and schoolyard in Karabach, a small town in the Urals of 10,000 inhabitants. An impressive testimony to the militarization of education in Russia during the reign of Vladimir Putin.
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