Oscar for anti-Putin documentary goes missing after airport forces director to check it

The Oscar statuette won by Russian filmmaker and former schoolteacher Pavel Talankin for the 2025 documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin has been lost by airline workers.

Talankin’s co-director, David Borenstein, reported the loss on an Instagram post on Friday. According to him, Talankin was stopped by a TSA agent at New York’s JFK Airport, where he had the Oscar in his carry-on bag for a flight to Frankfurt. The agent said that because the statuette could be used as a weapon, he could not carry it on board.

Because Talankin had no other bag, the TSA put the Oscar in a cardboard box and put it in the plane’s cargo compartment. According to Borenstein, however, the trophy “never arrived in Frankfurt”. He posted a photo of Talankin’s lost baggage slip.

“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?”

Borenstein tagged the TSA ended the post with an appeal to Lufthansa for help.

Mr. Nobody Against Putin, filmed between 2022 and 2024, uses smuggled footage to explore the growing use of military propaganda in Russian schools following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In mid-March, the film won Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles.