There Are No Fakes (2019)

Directed by

Jamie Kastner

Genre

documentary film

Country

Canada

Runtime

1h 53m

Rated

18A

Rating

7.0 of 10 from 4 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A musician sues an art gallery after learning a painting he bought might be fake. The documentary uncovers a large fraud ring that used child labor to produce forgeries of Norval Morrisseau's work, with some of the artist's own family involved.

investigativeunsettlingthought-provokingmethodicaleye-openingsoberingdetailed

What happens

There Are No Fakes is a Canadian documentary film, directed by Jamie Kastner and released in 2019. Starting with musician Kevin Hearn's lawsuit against the Maslak McLeod Gallery after being informed that a Norval Morrisseau painting he had purchased appeared to be a forgery, the film expands into an exposé of a significant art fraud ring that has produced many fake Morrisseau paintings through the use of forced child labour in sweatshops, in which some of Morrisseau's own surviving family members are complicit; by some estimates, there may be up to 10 times as much fake Morrisseau art on the market as real work. At the time of the film's release, Hearn's lawsuit had been dismissed by the courts on the grounds that he could not definitively prove that the painting was fake; in September 2019, the decision was overturned by the Ontario Court of Appeal, which awarded Hearn $60,000 on the grounds that the legal onus was actually on the gallery owner to prove that the painting was real, which he also could not do. The film premiered at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in 2019. It received selected other theatrical screenings through 2019, including at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary and the Thunder Bay Art Gallery in Thunder Bay. It had its television premiere on TVOntario on February 1, 2020. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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