Mr Nobody Against Putin wins the best documentary Oscar | Oscars 2026
No One Against Mr. Putin, which tells the story of a primary school teacher indoctrinating his students to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, won the Oscar for best documentary.
Pavel Talankin, who is currently in exile in Europe, received the award together with the film’s US co-director, David Borenstein. It beat out favorite The Perfect Neighbor to take the award, along with fellow contenders The Alabama Solution, Come See Me in the Good Light and Cut Through Rocks.
Borenstein began by thanking his family and friends, the Academy, and his fellow nominees. “Nobody Against Mr. Putin is about how you lost your country,” he said. “And what we see when working with this image is that you lose it through countless, small, small acts of complicity.
“We all face a moral choice when a government kills people in the streets of our major cities, when we say nothing, when oligarchs take over the media and control how we produce and consume it. But fortunately, no one person is more powerful than you think.”
Meanwhile, Talankin made a call on behalf of countries where “instead of shooting stars… they launch bombs and drones.”
He concluded his words as follows: “For the sake of our future, for the sake of all our children, all these wars should be stopped now.”
This is the third time this decade that a film critical of the Russian government has won the award, following Navalny in 2023 and 20 Days in Mariupol in 2024. Last year, the Oscar was won by No Other Land, an Israeli-Palestinian co-production about the destruction of a Palestinian community in the West Bank.
