No modern traveler has more notoriety than Merhan Karimi Nasseri, who has been stranded in Terminal One of Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport since 1988. Nasseri was expelled from Iran in 1977 and spent 10 years trying to gain political asylum in Europe. That all came to an end when his bag was stolen in Paris, essentially stranding him at CDG. In 1993, a movie was made about him (Lost in Transit), starring Jean Rochefort. Nasseri’s life reappears on screen this year in The Terminal, courtesy of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. And shamefully, Nasseri goes unmentioned in the movie’s production notes.

In The Terminal, Spielberg gives us Hanks as Viktor Navorski, a visitor from the fictitious country of Krakhozia in Eastern Europe. Hanks, made up to be pasty and lumpy, puts on a mush-mouthed accent reminiscent of Yakov Smirnoff, and finds himself landing at New York’s JFK on a mission we won’t discover until the end of the film. We know only that it involves a Planters peanut can.

Too bad for Viktor that his visa is denied once he lands in the . – his country’s government has been overthrown during the course of his flight. The . no longer recognizes his passport, and his country no longer exists. Viktor can’t come into the ., nor can he return home. Homeland Security agent Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci) has no choice but to sequester him in the airport’s international terminal, strictly forbidding Viktor from setting foot outside.

Viktor, who barely speaks English, quickly comes to understand his predicament, and soon enough he’s taken up residence in part of the terminal under construction. He learns to read and subsist on quarters refunded from the Smarte Carte machine. He becomes friends with the local shopkeepers and airport staff, and he falls for a sexy but scattered flight attendant (Catherine Zeta-Jones) who happens through.

Months pass. Will Viktor ever get out of the terminal? Dixon