Oscar statuette for 'Mr. Nobody Against Putin' goes missing on flight

LONDON: The Oscar statuette belonging to Pavel Talankin, the Russian director who won best documentary this year 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.

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 8.5 lb (3.8 kg) statuette ​posed a potential security threat, his co-director David Borenstein said on ⁠Thursday.

“At the airport, a TSA agent stopped him and said the Oscar ​could be used as a weapon,” 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 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 Friday, which is a public holiday in Germany.

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.

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Talankin and Borenstein’s documentary used two years of footage that 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”.