LOS ANGELES — Oscar winner Pavel Talankin was forced to check his golden statuette for his documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin at New York’s John F Kennedy airport, and now it’s missing.
Talankin said he had the Academy Award in his carry-on bag for a flight to Germany on Wednesday, but airport security stopped him because they said the award could be used as a weapon.
Talankin, whose documentation of Russia’s propaganda machine in grade schools won international acclaim, said 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 said after landing in Frankfurt, Germany, without the Oscar.
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 the Deadline news outlet. “He has a ticket number [for the box] and they can’t find it.”
Talankin, the co-director and protagonist of the Best Feature Documentary winner, travels with the award often to showcase at events at screenings.
Mr Nobody Against Putin is a documentary Talankin filmed documenting the ramping up of war propaganda in a Russian school, where he worked, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
He is now exiled from Russia for his own safety and living elsewhere in Europe.
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?”
“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.”
Russia has banned the documentary from three streaming platforms on the grounds that it “propagates extremism and terrorism”.
Lufthansa airlines, which helped Talankin pack the award in a box for the flight since Talankin didn’t have a checked bag, said their team is treating the incident with “care and urgency” and they are doing a “comprehensive internal search” for the award.
“We deeply regret this situation,” the airline said in a statement. “Our team is treating this matter with the utmost care and urgency, and we are conducting a comprehensive internal search to ensure the Oscar is found and returned as quickly as possible.”
Source: Saudi Gazette