The Upset Nobody Predicted
Mr Nobody Against Putin won Best Documentary Feature in what most prognosticators called the night's biggest upset. The Czech-Danish documentary, directed by David Borenstein and Pavel Talankin, was expected to lose to The Perfect Neighbor, a Netflix film built from police body camera footage.
The Competition
| Nominee | RT Score | Favored? |
|---|---|---|
| Mr Nobody Against Putin (WINNER) | 100% | No (underdog) |
| The Perfect Neighbor | -- | Yes (frontrunner) |
| The Alabama Solution | -- | No |
| Come See Me in the Good Light | -- | No |
| Cutting Through Rocks | -- | No |
The Film
Mr Nobody Against Putin follows Pavel Talankin, a schoolteacher in Karabash, a poor mining town near the Ural Mountains. While recording his students, Talankin documents the Putin administration's moves to control public perception during the Russo-Ukrainian war. The film premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Award in the World Cinema Documentary section.
It holds a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes from 39 critic reviews, with the consensus calling it "a powerful documentary that vividly illustrates the resilience of everyday people against institutional forces."
The Political Statement
Director David Borenstein spoke backstage about the film's relevance to current politics, including parallels to the Trump era. The documentary's win carries a political charge that separates it from purely observational nominees. Historically, the Academy has rewarded politically urgent documentaries: Citizenfour (2015), Icarus (2018), American Factory (2020). Mr Nobody Against Putin fits that pattern.
IMDb Rating
The film has a 7.5 IMDb rating, respectable for a documentary that had limited theatrical distribution.
Data Verdict
The 100% RT score is the highest of any winner at the entire ceremony. While documentary categories are harder to predict by pure metrics (smaller vote pools, less commercial data), the perfect critical score and politically charged subject matter created the conditions for an upset. The Academy's documentary branch trends toward films with urgent social/political relevance, and Mr Nobody Against Putin delivered exactly that.