How do you build an investigative film when neither side will give you the full story, and one of them won’t even meet you in person? And how do you tell a story whose subjects have almost no power at all, when filming could put them at greater risk?
Andreas Dalsgaard has faced both questions. As director of The Oligarch and the Art Dealer, Double Exposure’s Opening Night selection, he spent years unraveling a $2 billion art fraud dispute between a secretive Russian oligarch and the Swiss art dealer he accused of betrayal. The film parts the curtain on a borderless “Moneyland,” where fortunes move in secret beyond the reach of tax collectors and law enforcement. Along the way, it unearths masterpieces by Klimt, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Chagall and Leonardo da Vinci, that otherwise remain locked away in “freeport” vaults seen by almost no one.
As a producer of Sine Plambech’s Rescue, also screening at Double Exposure, Dalsgaard helped bring to the screen a story from the opposite end of the scale of power: a Yemeni family separated at sea during a rescue in the Mediterranean, and their desperate quest for safety.
In this session designed for students, Dalsgaard draws on both films to walk through the craft of investigative documentary: working where access is unequal and sources have every reason to lie; protecting vulnerable subjects while holding powerful ones to account; and leaving audiences room to weigh competing versions of the truth for themselves. It’s a real-world case study for anyone studying journalism, documentary or media production, and a rare chance to go behind the scenes of two of this year’s festival films.