Following on from Dream Empire [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] (2016) and Can't Feel Nothing [+lee también:
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entrevista: David Borenstein
ficha de la película] in league with Russian filmmaker Pavel Talankin. Awarded the Special Jury Prize in Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary competition, shortlisted for the upcoming Best Documentary Oscar and currently competing at the 17th Les Arcs Film Festival, the film revolves around a Russian teacher secretly documenting the propaganda-informed transformation of his smalltown school following the invasion of Ukraine.

Cineuropa: How did the idea for the film come about? How did you and Pavel Talankin come into contact?
David Borenstein: I was putting out feelers in Russia for another subject along similar lines. But it was actually Pavel who found me. It all started when a Russian firm posted a call for submissions on Instagram. Not long after that, Instagram was actually banned in the country. The firm was looking for testimonials on how the war in Ukraine, or what they called the special military operation, was affecting work for people in Russia. What they were actually doing was looking for positive testimonials from the Russian viewpoint, from people who had written letters to soldiers, etc. Pavel responded to the call and he was angry. He wrote: "let me tell you how my work has changed. I’ve become a protagonist and I’m wracked with guilt and anxiety every single day when I go to work". So he sent this letter, which was risky because he didn’t have a clue whose hands it would end up in. But, ultimately, it was read with compassion. And that’s how the journey began: it was forwarded to lots of different people and eventually it came to me, because I was a foreign director who could help Pavel. That’s how we got into contact with one another. We started working together a few weeks after the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as of March 2022. It wasn’t immediately clear that Pavel would be a director. I organised a shoot and one of my colleagues went to film him in Karabash. But when I received the footage, there was a file with images that Pavel had shot because he’d decided to help out. I loved his images. They were incredible.

How did you and Pavel communicate?
We benefitted from security advice from the BBC who came on board with the project in April 2022 and who helped us implement certain protocols. I quickly realised that encrypted messages would play a key role. We had to use an encrypted FTP server to transfer the images and be very careful about how we spoke to each other. There were other factors to consider too, like the way we were going to depict the characters in the film. It involved sharing the edits with Pavel, but I was advised not to, which was really difficult because he couldn’t see any proof that we were actually making the film.

How often did he send you footage?
Almost every day. Because he filmed everything. The film is an archive film in certain respects, because Pavel’s aim was to create a comprehensive archive of what was happening in Karabash. He wanted to record every single second of the propaganda’s evolution. If you ever want to see the full educational programme that Russia implemented after the invasion of Ukraine, Pavel filmed it. He filmed everyone in his school: all the teachers, all the students. So there was a huge amount of footage, and it kept on coming.

How did you decide to structure the film?
From the outset, it was clear to me that Pavel would be the main character, because he’s a really special young man. It was cinematography in the first person: he films himself walking, eating, etc. All I wanted was to convey his point of view and to understand the loss of this school and its transformation into something ugly from his perspective. It was hard finding the other main characters because the number of potential candidates was huge. There are three or four in the film, out of a possible 50. We had to watch a lot of material, be very patient and try to find storylines. But it became easier as time went by.

How did you feel about the ever-greater risks taken by Pavel?
We worked together until July 2024, so for two and a half years, give or take. The security measures we took became increasingly complex. When we first started, there wasn’t the law on treason in Russia; that law totally changed Russian society. The law on foreign agents wasn’t as strict either. We started out at a time when people were protesting against the war in the streets, thinking they weren’t at risk. It would be ridiculously dangerous to do that now. I knew that Pavel would have to leave Russia in order for the film to be released. I worried about him a lot, every day; it was an enormous responsibility, even though I knew he hated the Russian regime and he wasn’t prepared to accept what was going on. He would have done all the pranks he pulled at school, like replacing the national anthem with Lady Gaga, whether we were there or not. But having us there meant he wasn’t alone and he had a potential exit route. So we organised his extraction through our producers, and our Czech co-producer helped him get a visa. When he arrived and I showed him a rough cut, he liked it, and we finished editing the film together.

Do you know whether the film had any repercussions in Russia?
To date, there haven’t been any negative consequences in Karabash, where everyone’s seen the film. Sometimes, Pavel receives threats along the lines of "don’t come back", but then other people thank him for the film, which was leaked in Russia. Russian platforms are live streaming it, including the nationalists who tend to criticise it. But that allows other people to see it. The most common outlook on the situation is probably that everything’s hopeless and you can’t do anything about it, but once you get past that, there are lots of different opinions.