A $1 billion dispute over dozens of masterpieces involving a Russian oligarch, a Swiss art dealer and one of the world’s most powerful auction houses takes center stage in “The Oligarch and the Art Dealer,” Andreas Dalsgaard and Christoph Jörg’s three-part documentary series premiering in full this week at CPH:DOX.
The pilot episode debuted earlier this year at Sundance Film Festival. Copenhagen marks the world premiere of the complete series, which traces the decade-long legal battle between art dealer Yves Bouvier and Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev – a conflict that exposed how masterpieces worth hundreds of millions circulate through private deals, offshore structures and high-security storage vaults.
“We’ve spoken to many very wealthy people while making this,” Dalsgaard tells Variety. “They uniformly say that investing in art is considered maybe the best investment – better than gold, better than diamonds.”
The idea for the series was born from Dalsgaard and Jörg’s earlier collaboration as co-producers on Andreas Koefoed’s “The Lost Leonardo,” about the contested history of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi.” It centers on a dispute involving 38 artworks, including paintings by Van Gogh, Rothko, Klimt and Da Vinci.
Rybolovlev, who built his fortune in Russia’s fertilizer industry during the 1990s privatization era, accused Bouvier of secretly inflating prices on art purchases he mediated for him between 2003 and 2014 and pocketing the more than $1 billion difference.
Extensive legal documentation produced during years of litigation offers a rare insight into a market normally shielded from public view. A 2024 New York court case involving Sotheby’s, where Rybolovlev sought to show that the auction house played a role in the disputed transactions, anchors the narrative.
“We did not want to make this a story of innocence versus guilt, of villain versus victim,” Jörg says. “Rather, it’s a story based on power, ambition and the mutual dependence of these people. They built an entire ecosystem together that was structured around privacy – one provided logistics and knowledge about where all these masterpieces were, and the other had the resources to buy the biggest art collection of the 21st century.”
While Bouvier speaks on the record, the notoriously private Rybolovlev is represented through lawyers and his former financial director. Journalists and authors who have investigated the dispute help guide viewers through the web of art deals, lawsuits and competing narratives.
Asked how they managed to convince both sides to speak out, Dalsgaard says: “It was a question of saying: ‘If you don’t tell your version of the story, the other version will be undisputed.’”
As the series unfolds, it emerges that Bouvier, a snowboarding pioneer in his native Switzerland who was known for his love of speed and risk, was instrumental in developing a network of freeports – high-security facilities used by collectors and dealers around the world to store artworks outside national customs jurisdictions.
His appetite for risk even surfaced during filming: while shooting a ski sequence in the Alps, Bouvier collided with the cameraman at high speed and broke several bones – only to invite the crew back the next day to continue filming.
“He was an architect of a system of freeports that he built and created. The Geneva Freeport, which he developed, became the most important in the art world. It’s estimated to hold artworks worth in excess of $100 billion,” says Dalsgaard.
For the filmmakers, those facilities also offered a way to illustrate how the art market increasingly treats masterpieces as financial assets kept out of public view. To recreate moments that took place behind closed doors, Dalsgaard staged stylized reenactments of meetings where Rybolovlev was introduced to the artworks, using replicas of the paintings and the storage crates.
“We created the whole reenactment in a studio – it’s not meant to feel fully real,” he says. “It’s sort of a visual hyper-reality, a way to expand on what we see unfolding and the tension between the two men.” The goal, says Jörg, was less to deliver a verdict than to pull back the curtain on a market that allows masterpieces to circulate as financial assets. “I don’t think much will change in that world, but it was important for us to show how the system actually functions.”
The duo have several other films at this year’s CPH:DOX. Dalsgaard’s Elk Film is presenting the world premiere of “If Luck Will Come,” Poh Si Teng’s Sundance-premiering “American Doctor,” and is bringing “Rescue” by Sine Plambech and Janus Metz to the festival’s industry forum. Dalsgaard and Jörg are also behind “An Eye for an Eye” by Tanaz Eshaghian and Farzad Jafari, which premiered at Tribeca in 2025, where it won two awards.
“The Oligarch and the Art Dealer” is produced by Elk Film and Vestigo Films in co-production with Scenery, Akka Films and Words + Pictures. Global sales are handled by CAA Media Finance, with Dogwoof managing sales outside North America. Broadcasters attached include DR, Arte, RTS, VPRO, NRK, RUV and YLE.
The three-episode series had its world premiere at CPH:DOX on March 15 in the Special Premieres section. A feature-length version of the project is set to premiere in the spring.
CPH:DOX runs in Copenhagen until March 22.
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