“Mr. Nobody Against Putin” surprised many in the Dolby at this year’s Oscars when it took the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award over presumed favorite “The Perfect Neighbor.” But now, that Oscar itself at large.
“Mr. Nobody Against Putin” co-director/subject Pavel Talankin, who accepted the award onstage last month, was heading from John F. Kennedy International Airport on April 29 with his Oscar in his carry-on.
At the JFK security checkpoint, according to a post on co-director David Borenstein’s Instagram, a TSA agent told Talankin that the Oscar in his bag could be used as a weapon. “She wouldn’t let him carry it on board. Our EP Robin [Hessman] got on the phone and tried to reason with her. It didn’t work,” Borenstein wrote.
Instead, the Oscar statue was placed in a cardboard box to be checked into the hold of Talankin’s Lufthansa flight. It never arrived.
“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?” Borenstein wrote. The Instagram post also includes a picture of the “Property Irregularity Report” slip for missing baggage that Talankin was given, and a plea to Lufthansa to help find Talankin’s missing award.
Talankin emigrated from Russia in 2024, but before that, he worked as a teacher and school videographer at Karabesh Primary School No. 1 in Karabash, a mining town located in the Ural Mountains — and a prime target of the Putin regime’s recruitment drive for soldiers in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.
Talankin’s footage of the growing complicity and cruelty he witnessed, and of how he organized against it, is the focus of “Mr. Nobody Against Putin.”
Talankin’s security experience differs from that of at least one other director. Jim Jarmusch recently told IndieWire about the experience of traveling with his Golden Lion award for “Father Mother Sister Brother” out of Venice. Leaving Italy for Paris, Jarmusch said the Italian equivalent of TSA had asked him what was in the box containing his Golden Lion. When he told them it was a film festival award, the security agent gathered everyone else around to see the award and congratulate Jarmusch. “…All these Italians that work in the airport, they’re like TSA people, but Italian. They’re all patting me on the back. It was so cool. It was so Italian,” Jarmusch said.
An injury prevented the director from carrying the award on his flight from Paris back to America, so his producer, Charles Gillibert, was charged with the transport. “I made him swear, ‘You carry this fucker on, man. You do not check my lion,’” [Jarmusch] said. “And right now it’s in my apartment in New York.” So at least going from Europe to America, some film awards can be checked.
If Talankin’s Oscar is indeed stolen or missing, it joins a small, infamous list of MIA golden statues, including Hattie McDaniel’s, notoriously missing for more than 50 years, and Matt Damon’s, which he lost in a flood in 2002.
