A Best Documentary Oscar is missing. The Academy Award won by "Mr. Nobody Against Putin" at this year's ceremony has not been located after co-director Pavel Talankin was forced to check it as baggage on a Lufthansa flight out of John F. Kennedy International Airport on April 29.
According to a post on co-director David Borenstein's Instagram, a TSA agent at JFK told Talankin the Oscar in his carry-on bag could be used as a weapon and refused to let him board with it. An executive producer named Robin Hessman got on the phone to argue the point. It didn't work.
The statue was placed in a cardboard box and checked into the hold of the Lufthansa flight. It never arrived.
Borenstein posted a photo of the "Property Irregularity Report" slip for missing baggage that Talankin received, along with a plea directed at Lufthansa to help locate the award. "I've looked, and I can't find a single other case of someone being forced to check an Oscar," Borenstein wrote. "Would Pavel have been treated the same way if he were a famous actor? Or a fluent English speaker?"
The film's win was one of the surprises of this year's Oscars, where it beat presumed favorite "The Perfect Neighbor" for Best Documentary Feature. Talankin, a Russian emigrant who left in 2024, was a teacher and school videographer at Karabesh Primary School No. 1 in Karabash, a mining town in the Ural Mountains that became a target of the Putin regime's military recruitment efforts. His footage of that environment, and of his resistance to it, is the film's subject.
The experience contrasts sharply with how director Jim Jarmusch described traveling with his Golden Lion award from the Venice Film Festival. Jarmusch told IndieWire that Italian airport security not only waved his award through without issue, they gathered their colleagues to come look at it and congratulate him. "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," he said.
Jarmusch was ultimately unable to carry the Lion home himself due to an injury, so his producer, Charles Gillibert, handled the transport. Jarmusch said he made Gillibert promise to carry it on board under any circumstances. It made it safely to his New York apartment.
Talankin's Oscar has not been found. Borenstein's appeal to Lufthansa remains public on Instagram.
