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. Neon acquired it for global distribution shortly afterwards and released it on home video and on-demand platforms in May 2020, making it one of the highest-profile documentary releases of the pandemic. It also won the Audience Award at the BFI London Film Festival and the Golden Firebird at Hong Kong International Film Festival, and topped several 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 and 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 that became his signature. He took the same patient 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 built on 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. Ree handled cinematography and editing himself, 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 has been set alongside Lila Avilés's The Chambermaid and Mads Brügger's catalogue as one of the central works of recent European documentary. Its unconventional structure gives painter and thief roughly equal screen time and inner life, and declines the usual hierarchy of victim and perpetrator, a decision written about at length in Sight & Sound, the academic journal Studies in Documentary Film and Roger Ebert's online archive.