THE PAINTER AND THE THIEF

When a Czech painter has two major paintings stolen from Oslo’s Gallery Nobel, she embarks on a quest to better understand the thief through the lens of compassion and forgiveness.

Winner of the Special Jury Prize for Creative Storytelling from the Sundance Film Festival 2020, The Painter and the Thief tells of an unexpected bond that grows between artist Barbora Kysilkova and the drug-addicted thief Karl-Bertil Nordland. After he is caught and charged for the 2015 theft, Kysilkova approaches him in court to ask, ‘I wonder if I could paint you?’. What follows is a complicated and deeply personal narrative exploring the risks of entwined co-dependency that can form between an artist and muse when they are drawn to each other’s troubled histories.