Oscar Winner’s Statuette Missing After TSA Says He Can’t Board Flight With It

EXCLUSIVE: Pasha Talankin’s Oscar for Mr. Nobody Against Putin has disappeared after TSA officers at JFK airport in New York refused to let him board a flight with the statuette, declaring it could possibly be used as a weapon.

Talankin, the co-director and star of the Best Feature Documentary winner, tells Deadline he has flown a dozen or extra occasions with the Oscar since profitable the award in March, every time with out incident. But when he confirmed up at a safety checkpoint at JFK’s Terminal 1 on Wednesday, a TSA agent advised him he could not take the Oscar – which weighs 8.5 lbs. – on board.

“It’s completely baffling how they consider an Oscar a weapon,” Talankin advised us from Frankfurt, Germany, the place he arrived Thursday morning on a Lufthansa flight. On earlier flights on varied airways, he mentioned, “[I] “It flew with it in the cabin and there was never any kind of problem.”

Talankin says a Lufthansa agent referred to as to the safety checkpoint on Wednesday supplied to stroll the filmmaker to the gate and preserve possession of his statuette throughout the flight, however a TSA agent refused that dedication. Talankin says that Lufthansa agent additionally proposed storing the Oscar within the cockpit in the course of the flight, however TSA and a Lufthansa supervisor overruled that concept.

“You have to check it under the plane,” Talankin says he was advised. The Russian-born director contacted Mr. Nobody Against Putin govt producer Robin Hessman – who speaks Russian – to assist translate for him as he spoke with TSA and Lufthansa brokers.

“The woman from TSA was absolutely intractable,” Hessman advised Deadline. Without a hard-sided suitcase of his personal to retailer the Oscar, Talankin says Lufthansa offered him with a cardboard field to accommodate it for the flight to Frankfurt. As he videotaped on his cellphone, two Lufthansa brokers bubble-wrapped the Oscar, handed him a tag for the merchandise and took the field off for transport on the flight.

But when Talankin arrived in Frankfurt, the field was nowhere to be discovered.

“[Pasha] calls me this morning from Frankfurt saying Lufthansa doesn’t have it. They lost it,” Hessman said. “He has a ticket number [for the box] and they can’t find it.”

Deadline has contacted Lufthansa and the TSA for remark. We will replace this story if we hear from them.

Talankin, who was a grade faculty educator in an industrial Russian city, has been residing in exile after defying a Kremlin mandate to impose a nationalistic and militaristic curriculum on all Russian colleges after the nation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The movie directed by David Borenstein and co-directed by Talankin, paperwork how he went from being a beloved member of the college workers to a pariah.