By Matthias Williams
LONDON, May 1 (Reuters) – An Oscar statuette belonging to Russian director Pavel Talankin who won best documentary this year for “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” has been found after going missing on a flight from New York to Germany, German airline Lufthansa said on Friday.
Talankin had been forced to check the award into hold luggage before boarding a flight from John F Kennedy International Airport to Frankfurt, according to a post by his co-director David Borenstein on Instagram.
Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents told Talankin that the 8.5 lb (3.8 kg) statuette posed a potential security threat, Borenstein said, adding that the award then went missing.
“We can confirm that the Oscar statue has now been located and is safely in our care in Frankfurt. We are in direct contact with the guest to arrange its personal return as quickly as possible,” a spokesperson for Lufthansa said.
“We sincerely regret the inconvenience caused and have apologized to the owner. The careful and secure handling of our guests’ belongings is of the utmost importance to us. An internal review of the circumstances is ongoing.”
The TSA did not immediately reply to an emailed request for comment.
“At the airport, a TSA agent stopped him and said the Oscar could be used as a weapon,” Borenstein said on Instagram about Talankin.
“Pavel didn’t have a bag to check it in, so the TSA put the Oscar in a box and sent it to the bottom of the plane,” he said, posting a series of pictures, including of the box.
Speaking to the online magazine Deadline.com after arriving in Germany on Thursday, Talankin said it was “completely baffling how they consider an Oscar a weapon”.
On previous flights on various airlines, he had flown with it “in the cabin, and there never was any kind of problem,” he told the outlet.
Talankin and Borenstein’s documentary used two years of footage that Talankin had recorded at a school where he worked in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region to show how students were exposed to messaging in favour of President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
The 35-year-old Talankin, who fled Russia in 2024, has defended the film as a record for posterity to show how “an entire generation became angry and aggressive”.
(Reporting by Matthias Williams; additional reporting by Ulrike Heil; Editing by Kate Mayberry, Thomas Derpinghaus and Gareth Jones)
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