The Oscar statuette belonging to Pavel Talankin, star and co-director of the Academy award-winning documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin, has disappeared after officials at New York’s John F Kennedy airport confiscated it before he boarded a flight, claiming it could be used as a weapon.
Talankin, whose documentation of Russia’s propaganda machine in grade schools won international acclaim, told Deadline that he had brought the statuette on several flights without incident. But when he arrived at JFK’s terminal 1 on Wednesday morning, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents said he could not take the 8.5lb trophy on board because it posed a security risk.
“It’s completely baffling how they consider an Oscar a weapon,” Talankin told the outlet after landing in Frankfurt, Germany, without the Oscar. On previous flights through numerous airlines, he said, “[I] flew with it in the cabin and there never was any kind of problem.”
According to Talankin, an agent for the airline Lufthansa called the security checkpoint on Wednesday and offered to walk Talankin to the gate and maintain possession of the statuette for the duration of the flight, but the TSA agent reportedly refused any compromise. The film-maker says he was told he would have to check the prize under the plane. But without a hard suitcase to store it, he opted for a cardboard box offered by Lufthansa, and videotaped two airline agents as they bubble-wrapped the Oscar, tagged it and took it off for transport.
Talankin claims that box never made it to Frankfurt, and the statuette is now missing. “[Pavel] calls me this morning from Frankfurt saying Lufthansa doesn’t have it. They lost it,” Robin Hessman, an executive producer on Mr Nobody Against Putin and a Russian translator for Talankin, told Deadline. “He has a ticket number [for the box] and they can’t find it.”
The film’s other director, David Borenstein, posted photos on Instagram of the ad hoc shipping box and the airline’s lost baggage slip. “I’ve looked and I can’t find a single other case of someone being forced to check an Oscar,” he wrote. “Would Pavel have been treated the same way if he were a famous actor? Or a fluent English speaker?”
Talankin, a former school videographer in Karabash, Russia, now lives in exile in Europe after fleeing his home country with the footage that would become Mr Nobody. A Russian court has since banned the Bafta-winning film from several platforms, alleging it promotes “negative attitudes” about the Russian government and the war in Ukraine.
“Mr Nobody Against Putin is about how you lose your country,” said Borenstein while accepting the Oscar in March. “And what we saw when working with this footage is that you lose it through countless, small, little acts of complicity.”
In his own speech accepting the award, Talankin pleaded on behalf of countries where “instead of shooting stars … they have shooting bombs and shooting drones”.
He concluded: “In the name of our future, in the name of all of our children, stop all of these wars now.”