
American Masters
Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore
Marlee Matlin, the first Deaf actor to win an Academy Award, looks back on her remarkable life, career, and the complexities of being the “first.”
In 1990, two thieves dressed as police officers gained entrance to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, successfully executing the largest art heist in modern history.
Rebecca Dreyfus is an award-winning independent filmmaker. Legendary film critic Stanley Kauffman has called her work “a testament to what film can do in the hands of a good documentarian: turn fact into truth.” Dreyfus’s full-length film Stolen garnered an audience award as well as prizes for best documentary and best musical score. Her first… Show more
The Sundance Institute named Susannah Ludwig the 2003 Mark Silverman Fellow. She is the co-founder of Persistence of Vision Films/Flourish Films, a New York-based production company. Ludwig’s film Stolen won the audience award at the 2005 Sarasota Film Festival and the best documentary award at the New York Avignon Film Festival. Ludwig has been a major… Show more
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It was the most expensive art heist in American history. In March 1990, two thieves disguised as Boston police officers gained entrance to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and successfully plundered $500 million worth of art. Among the 13 priceless works stolen were Rembrandt’s The Sea of Galilee and Vermeer’s The Concert, one of only 35 of the master’s surviving works.
Stolen raises a new magnifying glass to this crime, following the renowned art detective Harold Smith as he pursues the mystery of the stolen works. Despite his lifetime battle with skin cancer, the cunning and witty Smith has made this case his personal obsession, working with what hope remains. What follows is a wild journey that crosses two continents, entailing secret meetings with a member of Boston’s criminal underworld, a former Scotland Yard detective, and a talkative informant called “The Turbocharger” who happened to know a great deal about a particular international terrorist group and its possible link to the missing Gardner art. With Smith as a guide, Stolen journeys into the mysterious and surreal world of stolen art and examines the many possibilities as to where the art might be today.
Interwoven with Smith’s investigation are noted contemporary authors discussing the power of Vermeer’s work, as well as collector Isabella Stewart Gardner’s turn-of-the-century correspondence (read by Blythe Danner) with her advisor Bernard Berenson (read by Campbell Scott). These subplots give the film a larger context and help illuminate just what the world has lost.
An outrageous story of the largest unsolved art theft in American history, Stolen brings the audience on a journey to understand not just a crime but also the nature of beauty itself — its fragility and its power.
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