Pavel Talankin Loses Oscar After JFK TSA Forces 8.5lb Check
pavel talankin’s Oscar disappeared after New York’s JFK airport security made him check the 8.5lb statuette on Wednesday. He landed in Frankfurt without it, turning a routine airport handoff into a missing-award search for the star and co-director of Mr Nobody Against Putin.
Talankin had taken the Oscar through several flights before arriving at JFK’s terminal 1 on Wednesday morning. This time, TSA agents said the trophy could not go on board because it posed a security risk, even after a Lufthansa agent reportedly called the checkpoint and offered to walk him to the gate with the statuette in hand.
JFK Terminal 1
Talankin said he was told to check the prize under the plane, so Lufthansa supplied a cardboard box. Two airline agents bubble-wrapped the Oscar, tagged it and took it off for transport. After landing in Frankfurt, he said the box never arrived, and the statuette is now missing.
“It’s completely baffling how they consider an Oscar a weapon,” Talankin said after landing in Frankfurt, Germany, without the trophy. He also said, “[I] flew with it in the cabin and there never was any kind of problem.”
Robin Hessman and David Borenstein
Robin Hessman said Talankin called from Frankfurt saying Lufthansa did not have the box. “He has a ticket number [for the box] and they can’t find it,” she said. David Borenstein posted photos of the ad hoc shipping box and the airline’s lost baggage slip, then wrote, “I’ve looked and I can’t find a single other case of someone being forced to check an Oscar.”
The missing statue lands awkwardly on a film that already carries political weight. Talankin lives in exile in Europe after fleeing Russia with the footage that became Mr Nobody Against Putin, and a Russian court has banned the Bafta-winning film from several platforms, saying it promotes negative attitudes about the Russian government and the war in Ukraine.
Borenstein accepted the Oscar in March, saying, “Mr Nobody Against Putin is about how you lose your country” and “And what we saw when working with this footage is that you lose it through countless, small, little acts of complicity.” Talankin used his own March acceptance speech to call on countries to stop all wars now; after JFK, the immediate issue is whether Lufthansa can locate the box before the trail goes cold.
