\n\tIt may be the strangest lost luggage claim of the year: an Oscar statuette.<\/p>\n
\n\tPavel Talankin, co-director and subject of the Academy Award-winning Mr. Nobody Against Putin<\/a>, says his trophy vanished after TSA agents forced him to check it \u2014 and the airline lost it.<\/p>\n \n\tTalankin, who was flying home to Europe out of New York\u2019s JFK airport on Wednesday, claims airport security refused to let him take his statue on board as a carry-on and forced him to check it. The award was packed into a small box and put at the bottom of the aircraft. When Talankin arrived in Frankfurt, the little gold statue was gone. It is still missing.<\/p>\n \n\tMr. Nobody Against Putin<\/a> co-director David Borenstein posted the story of the lost Oscar on Instagram, complete with a before photo showing Talakin with the Oscar hanging in a mesh bag hooked to his belt, a photo of the box where the Oscar was stored, and an after photo of the lost baggage slip.<\/p>\n \n\tHe tagged Lufthansa, asking for help and the TSA with a question: \u201cI\u2019ve looked, and I can\u2019t 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?\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tTalankin brought the Oscar back to Europe after the Academy Awards ceremony on March 15, taking it as a carry-on, without incident. He returned to the U.S. earlier this month, again taking the statue on board. Mr. Nobody Against Putin U.S. distributor Kino Lorber told The Hollywood Reporter that since the Oscars<\/a>, both Borenstein and Talankin \u201chave exclusively traveled with [their Oscar] as carry-on.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tMr. Nobody Against Putin tracks the efforts of Talankin<\/a>, a primary-school teacher living in a small town in the Ural mountains, to document efforts by Moscow to indoctrinate his young pupils with nationalist propaganda supporting the war in Ukraine. Borenstein secretly recorded footage \u2014 he was the school videographer \u2014 which he smuggled out via an encoded web application to a Copenhagen-based filmmaker. Talankin fled Russia<\/a> for Europe in the summer of 2024.<\/p>\n