Romanian art heist film frames theft within political and migrant struggles – The Art Newspaper

In 2012, Romanian thieves pulled seven work by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin and others from the partitions of the Kunsthal Rotterdam. The job that appeared too straightforward turned out to not be. The lads who have been caught went to jail. The work, which they took to Romania, have been by no means recovered. Investigators say the artwork was burned to destroy proof.

Jaful Secolului (Visitors, 2024), now making the rounds at US movie festivals, is a Romanian heist movie impressed by that failed gambit and linked to the plight of migrant staff from the East in Western Europe. The movie is Romania’s nationwide choice to compete for the Finest Worldwide Movie Oscar at subsequent yr’s Academy Awards.

The movie’s title in Romanian interprets to “The Heist of the Century” and it’s a advertising and marketing miracle that it had its New York debut on 3 December (throughout Making Waves, the town’s annual showcase of Romanian cinema), not lengthy after the brazen theft of crown jewels from the Musée du Louvre in Paris.

Visitors was conceived after the 2012 theft in Rotterdam, says the movie’s director Teodora Ana Mihai, and filmed lengthy earlier than the latest Louvre heist, but the 2 tales share similarities. Within the Louvre theft and in Visitors, each teams of suspects are immigrants or are from immigrant households. The movie’s director lived the immigrant expertise as a Romanian who grew up in Belgium; its star, Anamaria Vartolomei, is a Romanian who was raised in France.

In Visitors, Natalia (Vartolomei) works in Belgium in an enormous tent the place greens are grown. Her associate Ginel, deep in debt, kinds trash dumped from rubbish vehicles and drives drug sellers round city for money. Cash is scarce. Natalia’s boss asks her to work late one night serving drinks “and different issues”. She is approached by the native museum director, then carried off and assaulted by two different males. Determined for cash, she considers prostitution, as different Romanian girls have. A longtime good friend named Ita sees one other alternative in a neighborhood museum, the place a locked door opens with a slight push.

Ita and one other Romanian good friend enter the museum late one night time and, in a couple of minutes, seize seven work chosen largely by dimension then evade the police with Ginel on the wheel. Promoting the images in Holland proves onerous, and Natalia and Ginel return to their gloomy city within the Danube delta—empty from migration—with the artwork hidden in cushions, then bury the works in a graveyard. The police quickly discover the thieves, however not the work.

Visitors’s script and the small print of the Kunsthal Rotterdam heist diverge all through. In actuality, the mom of one of many thieves, who hid the works, informed police that she burned them, however later recanted her testimony. Police discovered burned frames and nails at her residence. Information studies and the next trials centered on the work’ worth—the works’ insurer paid out €18m—and on the alleged burning of proof.

Mihai says she and screenwriter Cristian Mungiu (one in every of Romania’s most profitable film-makers) made positive their story by no means strayed removed from the powerful immigrant life which may make such robberies value considering.“They’re thieves in a survival mode who don’t even know what they’ve on their arms,” she says. “The purpose is that you simply can’t even evaluate people who find themselves cultured and who’re born in privilege with individuals who dream about these luxuries and this privilege, however who have been born within the flawed mattress.”

Mihai notes that the movie has been obtained higher in Japanese Europe than within the West. It performs as a drama, typically darkly comedian, fairly than a polemic. The character of Ita, main the thieves, “is a sort of flawed Robin Hood character who clearly has a plan that goes method past simply incomes cash with it. He desires some sort of revenge,” she says.

The movie ends at a second when artwork turns into much less necessary for one character than household ties. It could possibly be a tough lesson to just accept for Western European and North American audiences that see museums as sacred locations. It’s one in every of a number of surprises that make Visitors extra than simply one other artwork heist film.

Watch the trailer for Visitors:

Visitors not too long ago screened at Making Waves in New York and can present subsequent on the Palm Springs Worldwide Movie Pageant, 2-12 January 2026