On March 16, an emotional Pavel Talankin (Karabash, Russia, 35 years old) took the stage at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles to receive from Jimmy Kimmel the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for Mr. Nobody vs. Putin. The co-director of the documentary —alongside David Borenstein— about the indoctrination of Russian students to support the invasion of Ukraine turned his acceptance speech into a call on behalf of the countries where “instead of shooting stars they have bombs and drones that fire.” “In the name of our future, in the name of all our children, stop all these wars right now!” Talankin said amid applause and cheers from the Hollywood stars present in the audience.
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That night was all joy and celebration for the Russian documentarian and his team, but after that, Talankin has kept encountering obstacles. First, on March 27, two weeks after the Oscars, he was declared a foreign agent by the Russian government, which has added the teacher to its list of proscribed individuals and accuses him of opposing the war against Ukraine. A day earlier, a court in the region where he taught, Chelyabinsk, banned the screening of the film that earned him the Academy’s recognition. Now, he has lost the award. According to his colleague Borenstein this Thursday, April 30, the co-director’s statuette disappeared after he was forced to check the Oscar as checked baggage on a flight from New York to Germany.
“At the airport, a TSA [U.S. Transportation Security Administration] agent stopped him and said the Oscar could be used as a weapon. Pavel didn’t have a suitcase to check it in, so the TSA put the Oscar in a box and sent it to the bottom of the plane. It never arrived in Frankfurt,” Borenstein explains in an Instagram post along with a series of images, including a photo showing the box in which the Oscar was last seen. A video has also circulated showing two Lufthansa workers wrapping the statuette in bubble wrap before placing it in the box.
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“I have searched and cannot find a single other case of someone being forced to check an Oscar. Would they have treated Pavel the same way if he were a famous actor? Or if he spoke English fluently?” Borenstein asked in the post’s text, directly mentioning the TSA account.
He also mentioned the German airline, asking for help: “Please help us find it. If you have any information, please send us a direct message. And if anyone else has ever had to check an Oscar statuette, I would love to know.” Lufthansa, unlike the TSA, quickly responded through a comment on the post. “Oh no! An Oscar has been lost! We understand you and we are here to help. Here is what will happen now: we are taking charge of the matter. And we take it very seriously. Our team is ready to help you locate the lost package and return it to its place. We are committed to making it happen,” the company replied, saying it has escalated the matter “to a higher level,” with language more typical of a bot.
In statements to Deadline after his arrival in Germany this Thursday, Talankin says he finds it “completely baffling that they consider an Oscar a weapon.” “On previous flights with various airlines, I had traveled with it in the cabin, and there was never any kind of problem,” he told the film industry outlet. The Russian documentarian says a Lufthansa worker who came to the security checkpoint on Wednesday offered to accompany him to the boarding gate and keep his statuette during the flight, but a TSA agent rejected the proposal. Talankin also highlights that the Lufthansa worker proposed storing the Oscar in the pilot’s cabin during the flight, but the TSA and an airline supervisor dismissed the idea.
Talankin and Borenstein’s documentary used two years of footage that the former recorded at a school where he worked in the Russian region of Chelyabinsk to show how students were exposed to pro-war messages. He fled Russia in 2024 and defends the film as a testimony for posterity showing how “a whole generation became furious and aggressive.”
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