The Painter and the Thief

Benjamin Ree's The Painter and the Thief premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020, where it won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Storytelling. It was acquired by Neon for global distribution shortly afterwards and released on the streamer's home-video and on-demand platforms in May 2020 — one of the highest-profile pandemic-era documentary releases. The film also won the Audience Award at the BFI London Film Festival and the Golden Firebird at Hong Kong International Film Festival, and topped multiple end-of-year best-documentary lists including the BBC's, The Washington Post's and The Boston Globe's.

Ree was twenty-nine when the film premiered. Born in Norway, trained at Lillehammer University College and the Norwegian Film School, he had previously made the documentary Magnus (2016), about Magnus Carlsen, before turning to the long-form, embedded portrait style that would become his signature. He would extend the same patient embedded-relationship method into The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (2024), which won both the Audience Award and the Directing Award in the World Cinema Documentary competition at Sundance — making him one of the most-decorated emerging documentarists of his generation.

The film is structured around the long working relationship between Barbora Kysilkova — a Czech hyperrealist painter who had moved to Berlin and then Oslo in the early 2010s — and her subject Karl Bertil-Nordland, the man who had stolen two of her largest canvases from the Galleri Nobel in Oslo in April 2015. Cinematography and editing are by Ree himself in collaboration with Robert Stengård and Christoffer Heie; the score is by the Norwegian composer Uno Helmersson, who had also scored the Oscar-shortlisted documentary The Cave.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: Ree's film is widely treated as one of the central works of recent European documentary, alongside Lila Avilés's The Chambermaid and Mads Brügger's catalogue. The unconventional structural decision — granting roughly equal screen time and inner life to both painter and thief, and refusing the conventional victim/perpetrator hierarchy — has been written about extensively in Sight & Sound, the academic journal Studies in Documentary Film and Roger Ebert's online archive.