London, German airline Lufthansa has said that it has located the Oscar statuette belonging to Russian filmmaker Pasha Talankin that went missing after airport security at New York’s JFK flagged it as a potential weapon and forced him to check it in as cargo.
Talankin, co-director of “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” which won the Best Feature Documentary at the Academy Awards in March this year, had been left in a state of shock after the award vanished during his journey from New York to Frankfurt on Wednesday.
In a statement to BBC on Friday evening, the airline said the trophy had been found and will be returned to Talankin “as quickly as possible”.
“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,” Lufthansa said.
The airline added that it initiated an internal review into the circumstances, which is currently underway.
For Talankin, the trouble began on Wednesday at a security checkpoint at JFK, where an official stopped him from carrying the statuette which weighs approximately 3.8 kg on board his Lufthansa flight.
Talankin told Deadline that he found the decision baffling, having flown more than a dozen times with the Oscar since winning it in March without any incident.
“It’s completely baffling how they consider an Oscar a weapon… flew with it in the cabin, and there never was any kind of problem,” Talankin said.
A Lufthansa airline agent at the checkpoint offered to escort the filmmaker to the gate and hold the statuette for the duration of the flight, but the security official refused.
A proposal to store the Oscar in the cockpit was also overruled by airport security and a Lufthansa supervisor.
Left with no option, Talankin was asked to check the award in as cargo. Airline officials provided him with a cardboard box, two agents bubble-wrapped the Oscar, and it was taken for transport a process Talankin recorded on his phone.
When he landed in Frankfurt, however, the box was nowhere to be found.
Talankin, a former grade school educator, has been living in exile after defying a Kremlin mandate to impose a nationalistic and militaristic curriculum on Russian schools following the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Mr. Nobody Against Putin”, directed by David Borenstein and co-directed by Talankin, documents his journey from being a beloved member of his school’s staff to becoming a pariah.
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