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 deeply regret this situation,” a company spokesperson later said in response to a Reuters request for comment.

“Our team is handling this matter with the utmost care and urgency and we are conducting a comprehensive internal search to ensure that the Oscar is found and returned as soon as possible.”

Speaking to the online magazine Deadline.com after arriving in Germany on Thursday, Talankin said it was “completely baffling how they consider an Oscar a weapon.”

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.

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”.