Art Undercover (2017)

This is one of the stories in which it is hard to believe. Shlomo Cohen-Abarbanel, an Israeli Mossad secret agent who worked undercover in Egypt managed to convince everybody that he was a French abstractionist painter Charduval – and even sold some of his works depicting naive and primitive scenes from the life of the mysterious East. He became the subject of this post-documentary film (one that is beyond the feature/documentary division), around which its director Tamir Zadok, who also appears in “Art Undercover”, created an entire exhibition in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2018. Tamir travels to Cairo in order to find Charduval’s paintings that were sold to the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art, while also trying not to give his identity away. This way Zadok is also creating art undercover, brilliantly carrying on the tradition of artistic espionage, alternating documentary episodes with scenes that but imitate real-life footage. The film becomes a match to the subject it explores.