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 a day earlier, the airline said.
Mr. 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, the American filmmaker David Borenstein, who posted about the incident on Instagram on Thursday in an effort to locate the lost prize.
The staff gave Mr. Talankin a cardboard box in which to check the Oscar because he didn’t have another bag, according to Mr. Borenstein. When he arrived in Frankfurt, the box wasn’t at baggage claim.
Christina Semmel, a spokeswoman 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.
Mr. Borenstein said via text message on Friday that he and Mr. 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 T.S.A. webpage last updated in 2017 says trophies are allowed in carry-on bags, but that “the final decision rests with the T.S.A. officer on whether an item is allowed through the checkpoint.”
The T.S.A. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Under the Montreal Convention, an international treaty governing airline liability, Mr. Talankin could have been entitled to compensation from Lufthansa of up to 1,900 euros, or about $2,231, 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 Mr. Talankin, of how students at a school in Karabash, a Russian industrial town, were inundated with state-mandated propaganda about the war with Ukraine.
Mr. Talankin was the activities coordinator at the school. He fled Russia in the summer of 2024 and now lives in Prague.
Alex Marshall contributed reporting.
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Gabe Castro-Root is a travel reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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