The Oscar statuette belonging to Pavel Talankin, star and co-director of the Academy award-winning documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin, that went missing after Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials refused to let him carry it with him on his flight in New York has been found, according to the airline involved.
Talankin said he lost his Oscar after TSA agents at New York’s John F Kennedy airport refused to let him bring it on a Lufthansa flight to Germany, claiming it could be used as a weapon.
The airline has now told the BBC that the statuette has “been located and is safely in our care in Frankfurt”, and it is arranging its return to Talankin “as quickly as possible”.
“We sincerely regret the inconvenience caused and have apologised to the owner. The careful and secure handling of our guests’ belongings is of the utmost importance to us,” a representative for the airline added. “An internal review of the circumstances is ongoing.”
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, TSA agents said he could not take the 8.5lb trophy onboard 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 into the plane’s hold. 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 claimed that box never made it to Frankfurt. “[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?”
Borenstein has since told the BBC he was relieved the statuette had been found after the “big kerfuffle”.
“They just found this flimsy box and told him to put it in there … Everyone was kind of saying, ‘This is an Oscar, why are you doing this?’”
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.”
