EXCLUSIVE: Pasha Talankin’s Oscar for Mr. Nobody Against Putin has disappeared after TSA officials at JFK Airport in New York refused to let him board a flight with the statuette, declaring it could be used as a weapon.
Talankin, the co-director and protagonist of the Best Feature Documentary winner, tells Deadline he has flown a dozen or more times with the Oscar since earning the award in March, each time without incident. But when he showed up at a security checkpoint at JFK’s Terminal 1 on Wednesday, a TSA agent told him he couldn’t take the Oscar – which weighs 8.5 lbs. – on board.
“It’s completely baffling how they consider an Oscar a weapon,” Talankin told us from Frankfurt, Germany, where he arrived Thursday morning on a Lufthansa flight. On previous flights on various airlines, he said, “[I] flew with it in the cabin, and there never was any kind of problem.”
Pavel Talankin with his Oscar statuette near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on March 27, 2026.
Photo by Contributor/Getty Images
Talankin says a Lufthansa agent called to the security checkpoint on Wednesday offered to walk the filmmaker to the gate and maintain possession of his statuette for the duration of the flight, but a TSA agent refused that compromise. Talankin says that Lufthansa agent also proposed storing the Oscar in the cockpit during the flight, but TSA and a Lufthansa supervisor overruled that idea.
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“You have to check it under the plane,” Talankin says he was told. The Russia-born director contacted Mr. Nobody Against Putin executive producer Robin Hessman – who speaks Russian — to help translate for him as he spoke with TSA and Lufthansa agents.
“The woman from TSA was absolutely intractable,” Hessman told Deadline. Without a hard-sided suitcase of his own to store the Oscar, Talankin says Lufthansa provided him with a cardboard box to house it for the flight to Frankfurt. As he videotaped on his phone, two Lufthansa agents bubble-wrapped the Oscar, handed him a tag for the item and took the box off for transport on the flight.
But when Talankin arrived him Frankfurt, the box was nowhere to be found.
“[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 comment. We will update this story if we hear from them.
Pasha Talankin’s “Property Irregularity” from Lufthansa pertaining to the missing Oscar.
Pasha Talankin
Talankin, who was a grade school educator in an industrial Russian town, has been living in exile after defying a Kremlin mandate to impose a nationalistic and militaristic curriculum on all Russian schools after the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The film directed by David Borenstein and co-directed by Talankin, documents how he went from being a beloved member of the school staff to a pariah.
In an Instagram post, Borenstein tagged Lufthansa and the TSA, writing, “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?” The post has received dozens of comments, including one from a person who wrote, tagging Lufthansa, “This is unacceptable. Find and return this Oscar, or pay the Academy Awards to replace it.”
Another wrote in response to Borenstein’s post, “This is absolutely INSANE. I’m so sorry and furious that happened to Pavel. How many other Oscars traveled back to Europe safely…or BAFTAS or Emmys (now those are real weapons)!”