Money, power, art, fraud allegations and a business partnership, maybe even a friendship, gone awry make for an explosive cocktail in The Oligarch and the Art Dealer. The story that has all sorts of Shakespearean flavors is a drama, but not a play. What may sound like a James Bond film isn’t served up shaken or stirred. And yes, it has elements of Succession but isn’t a fictional series. It is a three-episode documentary series. All three hours are screening at the ongoing CPH:DOX, the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, after the first episode was shown at Sundance. And it makes the series the only one featured at the fest, which has been very selective about the shows it features in its lineup.
Created by producer Christoph Jörg and director Andreas Dalsgaard, who co-wrote the series with Kevin Lincoln and previously collaborated on the feature The Lost Leonardo, the series tells the story of one of the 21st century’s most sensational art scandals that turned into a 10-year war over billions. The CPH:DOX website highlights its “cast of colorful characters that one could hardly invent even in the wildest imagination.”
The protagonists move in a secretive world of the super-rich that is typically shielded from the public’s view. The Russian oligarch is Dmitry Rybolovlev. The Swiss art dealer is Yves Bouvier.
Initially a discreet adviser, Bouvier becomes “a global power broker and manager of Rybolovlev’s investments in one of the world’s most closed and enigmatic markets,” highlights a synopsis. Said market is “the part of the art world where the sums are staggering and the value of artworks is something agreed upon by a narrow elite of connoisseurs and ultra-rich tycoons.”
But eventually, the gloves come off. “When the friendship between Bouvier and Rybolovlev suddenly explodes, a web of lies is revealed,” reads the synopsis. “The question is: who is really in the right?”
Miriam Norgaard is also a producer on The Oligarch and the Art Dealer, with co-producers Ines Bensalem, Philippe Coeytaux, Lea Fels, Lucy Sexton and Isidoor Roebers. The series is produced by Dalsgaard’s Elk Film and Jörg’s Vestigo Films in co-production with Scenery, Akka Films and Words + Pictures.
On the sidelines of the 23rd edition of CPH:DOX, which runs through Sunday, the two creators tell THR that they are happy to leave it to viewers to make up their minds, but wanted to invite them to take a peek behind the curtains of a world that most of us will never experience.
“We wanted to understand how this secretive world that these two people live in works,” Jörg tells THR. ”They had the same goal. But then what always happens in this kind of relationship is that greed shows up, ego shows up, human behavior shows up, and then things go wrong and explode.”
‘The Oligarch and the Art Dealer’
Courtesy of Elk Film
Dalsgaard highlights the Hollywood feel of the whole affair. “What partly drew me to this is that we are in a universe that resembles what we see in series like Succession or Billions,” he tells THR. “It’s almost like a James Bond universe, or Tenet. We see that stuff in fiction, but we never see it in a documentary. That’s because it’s so secretive and it’s so hard to get access. No one in this world wants to talk, because that makes you vulnerable, and only because these two guys went to war and fought it out in courts all over the world, we as a public can access what actually went on inside.”
Indeed, the team behind The Oligarch and the Art Dealer had thousands of documents to explore, including emails.
Dalsgaard compares the impact of the materials to “the shock that’s happening right now around the world with the release of the Epstein files,” explaining: “Suddenly we get an insight into all these networks and all the ways that these people are dealing with each other and using each other.”
One of the many insights of the series is on private auctions, “where an auction house puts these billionaires together, and then they are sitting there and fighting over a Klimt or whatever,” explains Jörg.
The series also shows a freeport in Geneva that has been called the largest art museum that you will never get into. “If you remember the end shot in Indiana Jones, where The Ark of the Covenant is put in a box and moved into this endless storage space, that’s pretty much what a freeport is,” explains Dalsgaard.
Given all the intrigue and power players involved, the duo behind the series emphasizes how much careful work, fact-checking and legal reviews the work on the project involved.
‘The Oligarch and the Art Dealer’
Courtesy of Elk Film
With all the makings of a Hollywood drama, who will show The Oligarch and the Art Dealer in the U.S.? The creators tell THR that no deal is in place – yet.
Asked about the series’ clear global appeal, Jörg offers: “It has some of those [ingredients] that also make Shakespeare universal. He wrote stories about kings and dukes and princes, and oftentimes they end up getting in trouble due to the faults that they have as human beings – their greed, their ego, their jealousy. And that ends up eating them from the inside. I think we see something very similar in this story.”
Concludes Dalsgaard: “This story is, of course, about art. But it’s really a story about how money and power wield their influence in the world, which is a timely [theme]. And art plays a big role in that. What I’m personally really fascinated by here is what makes this unique: There’s almost no other situation where we’ve ever had this kind of insight into the circles of money and power.”