Airline lost Oscars statuette after checking it in as ‘potential weapon’

Pavel Talankin won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in March. Photo / Angela Weiss, AFP

An airline lost an Oscars statuette belonging to Pavel Talankin, a Russian director, after he was forced to check it on to a flight as hold luggage.

Airport staff in New York told the former teacher – who won international acclaim for his documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin – that he could not carry the award in his hand luggage because it could be used as a weapon.

Lufthansa staff resolved the issue by bubble-wrapping the 3.9kg statuette and packing it into a box for transport as a checked item on the flight, while Talankin filmed on his phone.

But by the time he landed in Frankfurt, Germany, the Oscar had vanished. On Friday, Lufthansa confirmed that it had found the missing award.

“It’s completely baffling how they consider an Oscar a weapon,” the director told Deadline, saying he had flown with it a dozen or more times without “any kind of problem” since winning the Academy Award for best documentary feature in March.

A Lufthansa spokesman told the Telegraph: “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.

“We sincerely regret the inconvenience caused and have apologised 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.”

Robin Hessman, the anti-war documentary’s executive producer, who helped translate between Talankin and airport staff, told the BBC: “This wouldn’t have happened to Leonardo DiCaprio.

David Borenstein, the documentary’s co-director, posted on Instagram: “I’ve looked and I can’t find a single other case of someone being forced to check an Oscar.

“Would Pavel have been treated the same way if he were a famous actor? Or a fluent English speaker?”

In response to that post, Lufthansa said “we will do everything we can to find the Oscar as fast as possible and have already escalated this”.

Oscar statuettes are believed to cost between £300 ($690) and £750 to create, and the Motion Picture Academy reportedly allows winners to request a replacement if their award is lost or damaged.

Talankin, a school videographer, spent two and a half years documenting through footage and first-person narration how his school in the west-central Chelyabinsk region was transformed by pro-war propaganda and militarisation after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

He subsequently fled his home country carrying the footage and now lives in exile in Europe, while he has been declared a foreign agent by the Russian authorities.

A Russian court banned Mr Nobody Against Putin from streaming platforms in March, saying it promoted “negative attitudes” about the state and the war in Ukraine, and propagated “extremism and terrorism”.

The film caused controversy even among some Russian Opposition figures, who questioned the ethics of filming clips of children for mass distribution without their consent.

In his acceptance speech at the Oscars ceremony, Talankin called for an end to “all of these wars”, saying: “For four years, we look at the sky for shooting stars to make a very important wish, but there are countries where instead of shooting stars, they have shooting bombs and shooting drones.”

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