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.
