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There will be a screening of the film Mr. Nobody Against Putin, followed by a discussion with Pavel Talankin, the film’s director and protagonist. The event is part of the 14th annual International Conference for the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize.

This year’s conference will be dedicated to a theme from Václav Havel’s famous essay “A Word About Words”, which he wrote as his acceptance speech for the International Peace Prize of the German Booksellers Association, which he was awarded in absentia at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1989. In it, he reminds us that a word is an act that carries moral weight. Where the truth of a word weakens, a space opens up for lies, fear, and ultimately even violence.

“Words that electrify society with their freedom and truthfulness are matched by words that mesmerize, deceive, inflame, madden, beguile, words that are harmful – lethal, even. The word as arrow.” – Václav Havel, “A Word About Words”, 1989

PROGRAMME
11.00–13.00 – Panel Young, with guest Pavel Talankin, a Russian teacher and creator of the documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin, a Czech-Danish co-production that won a BAFTA and an Oscar.

• 11.00 – Screening of the film Mr. Nobody Against Putin (in Russian with Czech subtitles)

• 12.00 – Moderated discussion with students

The programme will be conducted in Russian with simultaneous translation into Czech. It is intended for secondary school and university students (a recording will be made). This event is organised in cooperation with the Václav Havel Library.

Pavel Talankin is a Russian teacher, documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, and co-director of the film Mr. Nobody Against Putin (2025). He was a teacher at a primary school in the town of Karabash, where, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he began secretly filming the transformation of everyday classroom instruction into an instrument of wartime propaganda. The documentary, which he created together with David Borenstein as a Danish-Czech co-production, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award. In 2026 the film also won a BAFTA Award for Best Documentary Film and an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature Film. Talankin left Russia in 2024 and now lives in exile in Prague. In March 2026 Russian authorities designated him a “foreign agent”.