It may be the strangest lost luggage claim of the year: an Oscar statuette.
Pavel Talankin, co-director and subject of the Academy Award-winning Mr. Nobody Against Putin, says his trophy vanished after TSA agents forced him to check it — and the airline lost it.
Talankin, who was flying home to Europe out of New York’s JFK airport on Wednesday, claims airport security refused to let him take his statue on board as a carry-on and forced him to check it. The award was packed into a small box and put at the bottom of the aircraft. When Talankin arrived in Frankfurt, the little gold statue was gone. It is still missing.
Mr. Nobody Against Putin co-director David Borenstein posted the story of the lost Oscar on Instagram, complete with a before photo showing Talakin with the Oscar hanging in a mesh bag hooked to his belt, a photo of the box where the Oscar was stored, and an after photo of the lost baggage slip.
He tagged Lufthansa, asking for help and the TSA with a question: “I’ve looked, and I can’t find a single other case of someone being forced to check an Oscar. Would Pavel have been treated the same way if he were a famous actor? Or a fluent English speaker?”
Talankin brought the Oscar back to Europe after the Academy Awards ceremony on March 15, taking it as a carry-on, without incident. He returned to the U.S. earlier this month, again taking the statue on board. Mr. Nobody Against Putin U.S. distributor Kino Lorber told The Hollywood Reporter that since the Oscars, both Borenstein and Talankin “have exclusively traveled with [their Oscar] as carry-on.”
Mr. Nobody Against Putin tracks the efforts of Talankin, a primary-school teacher living in a small town in the Ural mountains, to document efforts by Moscow to indoctrinate his young pupils with nationalist propaganda supporting the war in Ukraine. Borenstein secretly recorded footage — he was the school videographer — which he smuggled out via an encoded web application to a Copenhagen-based filmmaker. Talankin fled Russia for Europe in the summer of 2024.
Appropriately, Mr. Nobody Against Putin was the triumphant underdog at this year’s Oscars, winning best documentary. At the award ceremony, Borenstein said the film held lessons for any country that sees its democratic institutions under attack.
“[It’s] about how you lose your country…What we saw when working with this footage is that you lose it through countless small little acts of complicity. When we act complicit when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities. When we don’t say anything when oligarchs take over the media and control how we can produce it and consume it.”
Mr. Nobody Against Putin is still screening in select theaters and streaming on Kino Lorber’s Kino Film Collection. As of Monday this week, the film’s domestic box office was just $250,000.
The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to Lufthansa for comment on the missing Oscar.
