Wendy Ide 

The Painter and the Thief review – portrait of a crime

An artist reaches out to a man who stole two of her paintings with unexpected results in this staggering Sundance favourite
  
  

Karl Bertil-Nordland in The Painter and the Thief.
Karl Bertil-Nordland in The Painter and the Thief. Photograph: Barbora Kysilkova/AP

Fascinating, confounding and continually surprising, this Sundance prize-winning documentary takes a casual crime – the impulsive theft of two paintings from an exhibition by the Czech painter Barbora Kysilkova – and from it knits together the relationship of artist and muse, victim and perpetrator. Addict Karl-Bertil Nordland stole the paintings but claimed he was too wasted to remember what he did with them. Kysilkova asked not for recompense, but for a chance to understand. She asked him to sit for a portrait. And Nordland’s reaction to the picture – a man for the first time seen but not judged – is a devastating moment.

Watch a trailer for the Painter and the Thief
 

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