Pavel Talankin says Oscar vanished after JFK airport seizure

Pavel Talankin’s Oscar disappeared after Transportation Security Administration agents at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport took it from him before he could board a flight on Wednesday morning. The 8.5-pound trophy was first treated as a security risk, then packed in a cardboard box supplied by Lufthansa, and then, Talankin says, never showed up in Frankfurt.

Talankin said he had flown with the statuette in the cabin before without a problem. At JFK Terminal 1, a Lufthansa agent called the security checkpoint and offered to walk him to the gate while keeping the Oscar with him for the flight, but Talankin said the TSA agent refused any compromise and told him he would have to check the prize under the plane. Without a hard suitcase to store it, he used the cardboard box and videotaped two airline agents bubble-wrapping the Oscar, tagging it and taking it away for transport.

The missing trophy is the one tied to Mr Nobody Against Putin, the documentary Talankin helped make after fleeing Russia with the footage used in the film. In March, David Borenstein accepted the Oscar for the movie, and Talankin gave an acceptance speech calling on people to stop all of these wars now. The film has been described as an Academy Award-winning documentary and a Bafta-winning film, but in Russia a court has barred it from several platforms and said it promotes negative attitudes toward the government and the war in Ukraine.

That backdrop gives the airport dispute more weight than a lost-bag complaint. Talankin is now living in exile in Europe, far from Karabash, Russia, where he worked as a school videographer before fleeing with the footage that became the film. He said the whole episode made no sense, asking how officials could treat an Oscar as a weapon. Borenstein, who posted photos on Instagram of the shipping box and the airline’s lost baggage slip, said he could not find any other case of someone being forced to check an Oscar, and wondered whether Talankin would have been handled the same way if he were a famous actor or a fluent English speaker.

The unanswered question is no longer whether the trophy was allowed on board. It is whether anyone can still track down the box that held it. Robin Hessman said Lufthansa did not have the box and that it had been lost, while Talankin says the Oscar never reached Frankfurt. For a man who helped make a film about the quiet ways people lose a country, the loss now sits inside a different kind of bureaucratic silence.