He warns his wife she could be heading down a path of self-destruction. They find common ground and Kysilkova discovers a muse, sometimes to the dismay of her supportive husband, Øystein Stene. Might it be pity? Maybe it’s forgiveness? Perhaps her motive is just to find her missing paintings? You’re never quite sure and that uncertainty helps drive the narrative.Īn unlikely friendship forms between the text-book odd couple: Nordland, a tatted-up (he has “Snitchers Are A Dying Breed” across his chest) ex-con junkie Kysilkova, the proper, soft-spoken struggling artist. It’s never clear what Kysilkova’s end game is. In court, Kysilkova approaches Nordland and invites him to sit for a portrait. Nordland was on a heroin-fueled crime spree the night of the theft and he can’t recall where he left the paintings. The Norweigen documentarian paints his own sort of portrait - one of two lives suddenly intertwined after Kysilkova boldly befriends Karl-Bertil Nordland, one of two men convicted of pilfering her paintings. It’s another stranger-than-fiction heist featured in Benjamin Ree’s riveting documentary, “The Painter and the Thief,” available for rent on all the usual streaming spots on May 22. Two of her paintings were stolen in the dead of night from an Oslo gallery. That theft continues to catch worldwide headlines, as does the more recent 2015 caper involving Czech artist Barbora Kysilkova. Art heists have fascinated this area since the sensational - and still unsolved - 1990 robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where $300 million worth of art by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas and Manet was pinched by a pair of thieves dressed as Boston Police officers.