LONDON – The Oscar statuette belonging to Russian director Pavel Talankin, who won best documentary in 2026 for Mr. Nobody Against Putin, has gone missing after he was forced to check the award into hold luggage on a flight from New York to Germany, his co-director said.
Mr Talankin was due to fly from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Frankfurt on German carrier Lufthansa. But Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents told him that the 3.8 kg statuette posed a potential security threat, his co-director David Borenstein said on April 30.
“At the airport, a TSA agent stopped him and said the Oscar could be used as a weapon,” Mr Borenstein said on Instagram.
“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.
“It never arrived in Frankfurt.”
Responding to Mr Borenstein’s Instagram post, Lufthansa said it was taking the matter seriously.
“We will do everything we can to find the Oscar as fast as possible and have already escalated this,” it said.
Lufthansa did not immediately respond to a request for further comment on May 1, which is a public holiday in Germany.
Speaking to the online magazine Deadline.com after arriving in Germany on April 30, Mr 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.
Mr Talankin and Mr Borenstein’s documentary used two years of footage that Mr Talankin recorded at a school where he worked in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region, to show how students were exposed to pro-war messaging.
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”. REUTERS