Directed by Benjamin Ree
Featuring Karl Bertil-Nordlan and Barbora Kysilkova
Running time: 1 hour and 42 minutes

by Zoe Crombie

‘this is destructive’

I think it's fair to say that the most engaging, memorable documentaries follow stories that are stranger than fiction. This has been demonstrated recently with Tiger King, a show that enjoyed runaway success almost entirely because of the bizarreness of the subject matter, given that the filmmaking itself wasn’t anything outlandish or innovative for the genre. In contrast, though The Painter and The Thief has a similarly surprising story, its low-key, naturalistic approach transforms it from a record of a strange situation to a portrait of two individuals able to form a mutual understanding from a situation that could have created division.