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From Parkland to the Oscars: Stoneman Douglas Grad David Borenstein Wins Academy Award 4

David Borenstein accepting his Oscar during Sunday night’s Academy Award show {ABC}

A Parkland mother is celebrating a moment few parents ever experience: watching her son win an Academy Award.

“It’s not every day your son gets an Oscar,” said Patti Borenstein, whose son David Borenstein grew up in Parkland and graduated from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. “It was fantastic.”

Borenstein, a 2005 Stoneman Douglas graduate, co-directed the documentary “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature on Sunday night.

Patti Borenstein watched the televised Oscars ceremony from her home in the Parkland Golf and Country Club community, where the emotional moment quickly turned into a neighborhood celebration.

“I screamed so loud and so much that my neighbor came and knocked on my door and asked if I was okay,” she said.

Borenstein spent his childhood in Parkland, attending Riverglades Elementary School and Sawgrass Springs Middle School before graduating from MSD.

For his mom, the excitement did not end when the ceremony finished. The Oscar win triggered a flood of calls and messages from neighbors, friends, and people who remembered David growing up in the city.

“My phone blew up,” she said. “I didn’t sleep all night.”

By the next morning, the messages were still arriving.

“I woke up this morning to 65 texts,” the proud mom said.

Many of the messages came from people in Parkland who knew Borenstein during his years in local schools.

“Everybody is so happy,” Patti Borenstein said.

She said the reaction reflects the impression her son left on the community while growing up.

“David was always very well liked,” she said. “He was always doing community service.”

Even as a student, Borenstein said, her son showed a creative streak that would later boost his filmmaking career.

“He always wrote stories,” she said.

One teacher at Sawgrass Middle even predicted he might someday win the Pulitzer Prize.

The prediction now feels remarkably close.

“He didn’t win a Pulitzer, but he won an Oscar,” Borenstein said.

After graduating from Stoneman Douglas, Borenstein attended the University of Florida, graduating in 2009. He later studied at Columbia University and City University of New York before his career took him overseas. He now lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Before his Oscar win, Borenstein had already built an international reputation with several widely screened documentaries. His first feature, Dream Empire (2016), explored China’s booming real estate market and the practice of hiring foreigners to pose as executives or investors promoting luxury developments.

He later directed Love Factory (2021), a short documentary about China’s livestreaming economy and the agencies that train young influencers for online fame. More recently, his 2024 documentary Can’t Feel Nothing examined the global attention economy, exploring how social media platforms and digital algorithms shape — and sometimes manipulate — human emotions.

He also co-produced the 2020 NOVA PBS documentary “Decoding COVID-19,” which covered the initial six months of the pandemic. The documentary won a prestigious duPont-Columbia Award.

The Oscar-winning documentary “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” examines Russia’s propaganda, patriotism, and indoctrination programs aimed at schoolchildren following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The film centers on secretly recorded footage captured by Russian teacher Pavel Talankin, who documented lessons, chants, and school events promoting the war inside the small-town school where he worked as an activities director. Talankin secretly filmed the material and later smuggled hard drives containing hundreds of hours of footage out of Russia before collaborating with Borenstein to turn the material into the finished documentary.

During the Academy Awards ceremony, David Borenstein described the message behind the film.

“Mr. Nobody Against Putin’ is about how you lose your country,” he said. “You lose it through countless small little acts of complicity.”

While the Oscar has propelled Borenstein onto one of the world’s biggest stages, Borenstein said her son remains the same modest man she raised in Parkland.

“When I talk about him too much, he tells me, ‘Ma, stop,’” she said with a laugh.

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Kevin Deutsch

Kevin Deutsch is an award-winning journalist and author of two nonfiction books. He covers general assignment news and Jewish community issues for Talk Media. He has also worked as a staff writer at The Miami Times, the Rio Grande SUN, the New York Daily News, Newsday, The Miami Herald, The Palm Beach Post, The Riverdale Press, and Bronx Justice News.