The following interview with director Benjamin Ree about his documentary The Painter and the Thief was published during the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. It’s being rerun now to coincide with the virtual cinema and VOD release of the film from NEON. Spectacularly cinematic and employing a risk-taking structure that keeps the viewer as off-balance as the film’s emotionally fragile protagonists, The Painter and the Thief is the second feature-length doc from Norwegian director Benjamin Ree. (Ree’s prior film Magnus, a coming-of-age tale about the chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016.) The film follows the stranger-than-fiction story of […]

When Czech painter Barbora Kysilkova has two of her naturalist works stolen from an Oslo art gallery, she decides to attend the criminal hearing of one of the men, Karl-Bertil Nordland, who was arrested for stealing them. Instead of questioning him about the whereabouts of her paintings (which vanished without a trace), she asks to paint his portrait. Benjamin Ree’s The Painter and the Thief shifts perspectives between Kysilkova and Nordland, detailing the unexpected relationship that grows between the two. Editor Robert Stengaard explains how the film went beyond sentimental emotions in order to cleverly portray the unique perspectives from […]

The Painter and the Thief is a documentary that investigates the legitimacy of conventional labels: criminal and victim, vagrant and artist, unstable and rational. It follows Czech painter Barbora Kysilkova, who had a naturalistic work of hers heisted from an Oslo art gallery, as well as Karl-Bertil Nordland, the man convicted for stealing it. Mysteriously, the painting was never recovered, but Kysilkova had a proposition for the man who made her work vanish—could she paint his portrait? What follows is a story about human connection and its infinite possibilities. DP Kristoffer Kumar, who has collaborated with Ree extensively, talks about […]

Whether capturing or creating a world, the objects onscreen tell as much of a story as the people within it. Whether sourced or accidental, insert shot or background detail, what prop or piece of set decoration do you find particularly integral to your film? What story does it tell? The most important objects in our film are the missing paintings. The film is about a painter and a thief. Two paintings are stolen from Oslo-based artist Barbora Kysilkova, and the police catch the thieves but the paintings are never found. Barbora attends the court case hoping to find clues for […]