Airline loses, then finds, Oscar filmmaker was forced to check

A missing Oscar statuette belonging to Pavel Talankin, a co-director and the star of the documentary “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” turned up on Friday after it failed to arrive with passengers’ checked luggage aboard a Lufthansa flight from New York to Frankfurt, Germany, a day earlier, the airline said.

Talankin, whose film won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in March, planned to fly on Wednesday with the trophy in his carry-on. But Transportation Security Administration officers at Kennedy Airport said the Oscar could be used as a weapon and insisted he check it, according to his co-director, American filmmaker David Borenstein, who posted about the incident on Instagram on Thursday in an effort to locate the lost prize.

The staff gave Talankin a cardboard box in which to check the Oscar because he didn’t have another bag, according to Borenstein. When he arrived in Frankfurt, the box wasn’t at baggage claim.

Christina Semmel, a spokesperson for Lufthansa, confirmed on Friday that the Oscar had been found in Frankfurt and that the airline was “in direct contact with the guest to arrange its personal return as quickly as possible.”

“We sincerely regret the inconvenience caused and have apologized to the owner,” she said, adding that an internal review was underway.

Borenstein said via text message Friday that he and Talankin had both flown with their Oscar statuettes in their carry-on bags since winning them this year, and that he had never heard of anyone needing to check them.

A TSA webpage last updated in 2017 says trophies are allowed in carry-on bags, but that “the final decision rests with the TSA officer on whether an item is allowed through the checkpoint.”

The TSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Under the Montreal Convention, an international treaty governing airline liability, Talankin could have been entitled to compensation from Lufthansa of up to 1,900 euros (about $2,230) if the Oscar had not been found.

Oscar winners can request a replacement statuette if theirs is severely damaged or lost, according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The academy officially values Oscar statuettes at just $1 to discourage them from being sold.

“Mr. Nobody Against Putin” tells the story, from the perspective of Talankin, of how students at a school in Karabash, a Russian industrial town, were inundated with state-mandated propaganda about the war with Ukraine.

Talankin was the activities coordinator at the school. He fled Russia in the summer of 2024 and now lives in Prague.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.