‘Mr. Nobody Against Putin’ wins best documentary feature Oscar

By Canadian Press on March 15, 2026.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” has won the Oscar for best documentary feature.

The film’s central figure and co-director, Pavel Talankin, is a teacher and activities director in a small-town school in Russia who captures Vladimir Putin’s propaganda and patriotism program for the nation’s youth after its invasion of Ukraine.

Talankin smuggled the footage he’d shot out of the country and collaborated on the documentary with American director David Borenstein.

The war in Ukraine has loomed large in Oscar documentary categories since it began. The Associated Press documentary “20 Days in Mariupol” won best documentary feature in 2024. Last year, “Porcelain War,” about artists in the conflict, was a nominee. And this year’s documentary short nominees included “Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud,” about an American journalist killed in the early weeks of the war.

“Mr. Nobody Against Putin” has a lighter tone than the others, and is almost comical at times, with Talankin at moments resembling his fellow Oscar winner Michael Moore.

The film won the British Academy Film Award during the Oscar run-up. But the win was still something of an upset over “The Perfect Neighbor” — director Geeta Gandbhir’s Netflix film built almost entirely from police body camera footage — which most media prognosticators picked as the winner. Other major precursor awards including the Directors Guild and Producers Guild documentary awards went to films that weren’t even nominated for the Oscar, adding cloudiness to a category that’s annually hard to predict.

The other competition in the category came from “The Alabama Solution,” “Cutting Through Rocks” and “Come See Me in the Good Light.”

Andrew Dalton, The Associated Press