MOSCOW: Russia on Wednesday condemned the Oscar-winning documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin, saying it had featured children filmed without their parents’ consent, in Moscow’s first official reaction to the film scooping the prestigious award.

Small-town Russian school videographer Pavel Talankin, 35, won the Academy Award together with US filmmaker David Borenstein for the documentary, which chronicles pro-war patriotic lessons introduced in Russia’s schools under President Vladimir Putin amid Moscow’s Ukraine offensive.

Talankin, who fled Russia with the smuggled footage and now openly opposes the war, was instructed to film the propaganda lessons by the school administration, eventually deciding to secretly team up with the US director.

Russia’s human rights council, a government body, said that “images of minors were used without obtaining the consent of their parents” in the documentary.

It added that the footage was intended as an “internal record of school activities for educational use”, but then was used for commercial purposes.

Published in Dawn, March 19th, 2026