Some airport employees are at first rude to or suspicious of Viktor, but eventually he wins many friends. The head of security, Frank Dixon ( Stanley Tucci) wants to get rid of Viktor, but his hands are tied. He speaks little English, and suffers setbacks and indignities. He’s trapped in the International Flight holding area at JFK. He can’t go home, and he can’t leave the airport. But while he was in the air, his country became embroiled in a civil war and his passport isn’t valid until the conflict is resolved and the United States recognizes the new government. Viktor Navorski (Hanks) is a tourist from Krakozhia, visiting New York City. More geared toward adults and mature teens, but relatively clean in content. “The Terminal” is primarily a character study with a number of interesting people. And when he’s directing Tom Hanks, good things tend to happen. Steven Spielberg has a unique touch, regardless what kind of film he makes. But Viktor has long worn out his welcome with airport official Frank Dixon ( Stanley Tucci), who considers him a bureaucratic glitch, a problem he cannot control but wants desperately to erase.ĭuring his accidental exile, Viktor encounters and befriends an array of airport employees, some of whom aren’t very far removed from their own assimilation to America.” Stranded at Kennedy Airport with a passport from nowhere, he is unauthorized to actually enter the United States and must improvise his days and nights in the terminal’s international transit lounge until the war at home is over.Īs the weeks and months stretch on, Viktor finds the compressed universe of the terminal to be a richly complex world of absurdity, generosity, ambition, amusement, status, serendipity and even romance with a beautiful flight attendant named Amelia ( Catherine Zeta-Jones). The second and arguably more well-known take on this story is Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal, with Tom Hanks in the lead role as someone who is denied entry into the United States while his country experiences a military coup.Here’s what the distributor says about their film: “Viktor Navorski ( Tom Hanks) is a visitor to New York from Eastern Europe, whose homeland erupts in a fiery coup while he is in the air en route to America. The first is the French film Lost in Transit starring Jean Rochefort, which sees a man losing his passport in an airport terminal and meeting other passengers who are in the same predicament as him. While there have been other instances of airport dwellers occurring across the globe, Nasseri’s story is arguably the most well-known, as he served as the inspiration for numerous articles, documentaries, and even films. Soon after he was discharged, he went back to Charles de Gaulle Airport and lived there until he died of a heart attack on November 12, 2022.Ī somewhat profound and fitting end for the refugee who made the airport his humble abode, Nasseri earlier released an autobiography called The Terminal Man, which was co-authored by British author Andrew Donkin. Nasseri was taken to hospital in 2006, which ended his almost two-decade-long stay at the airport. No matter the time of day, Nasseri could be seen around Terminal 1 with his luggage by his side. With nowhere else to go, Nasseri soon became a permanent fixture at the airport, with travellers reportedly seeing the refugee eating at McDonalds, meditating on a bench, journaling, and listening to the radio. From Auguntil July 2006, Nasseri spent his days at Terminal 1 at Charles de Gaulle Airport.Īlso known as Sir Alfred Mehran, Nasseri became a stateless person in 1977 who, after journeying across Europe, found himself detained at the Charles de Gaulle Airport for travelling without proper papers. Such was the case with Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee who spent 18 years living at an airport in Paris, France.
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