During the flight from New York to Frankfurt am Main, the Oscar statuette received by one of the creators of the film “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” Pavel Talankin was lost.
Director David Borenstein spoke about the incident. According to him, on April 29, Talankin arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, where he intended to fly to Germany.
Airport security staff did not allow Talankin to take the statue in his hand luggage onto the plane. They considered, as Bornstein writes, that the Oscars could be used as a weapon.
The creators of the film “Mr. Nobody vs. Putin” tried to talk to airport employees on the phone, but that did not help.
As a result, they demanded that the statue be returned to the luggage compartment. Talankin did not have luggage, so the Oscar was put in a box and sent on the Lufthansa flight that the videographer was traveling on. But the box containing the statue never arrived at Frankfurt Airport.
“I searched, but I couldn’t find another case where someone was forced to check an Oscar as luggage. Would they have treated Pavel the same way if he had been a famous actor? Or had he spoken fluent English?” – writes Bornstein on Instagram. He asked Lufthansa to help find the statue.
Pavel Talankin is a videographer from the Ural city of Karabash, author and hero of the documentary “Mr. Nobody vs. Putin.” David Borenstein co-wrote Talankin.
“Mr. Nobody vs. Putin” won Best Documentary Feature at the 98th Academy Awards. In Russia, the film was banned from distribution, and Talankin was declared a “foreign agent.”