Russian director Pavel Talankin’s Oscar statuette went missing after he was forced to check it into hold luggage during a flight from New York to Germany. Co-director David Borenstein said Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents told Talankin that the 8.5 lb (3.8 kg) statuette posed a potential security threat.
“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.”
The statuette never arrived in Frankfurt.
Lufthansa, the German carrier handling the flight, responded that they were taking the matter seriously and would do everything possible to find the Oscar as fast as possible. They had already escalated the issue.
Talankin, who fled Russia in 2024, told Deadline.com after arriving in Germany that it was “completely baffling how they consider an Oscar a weapon.” He added that he has flown with the statuette before on various airlines without any problems.
The documentary, directed by Talankin and Borenstein, used two years of footage recorded at a school where Talankin worked in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region to show how students were exposed to pro-war messaging. The film aims to document how “an entire generation became angry and aggressive.”