Rohtko - Wiener Festwochen - Filmmakers

It is one of the art world’s greatest scandals. In 2004, a businessman and his wife bought a painting by expressionist painter Mark Rothko for 8.3 million dollars. They had fallen in love with it on sight. Only, as it turns out years later, it wasn’t painted by Rothko, but by a Chinese migrant from Queens. Can a forged painting trigger real feelings? What defines the value of art? What, in fact, is art? On a film set that is constantly changing – from a Chinese restaurant to the White Cube gallery – Polish director Łukasz Twarkowski and the cast of twelve investigate the relationship between original and copy, the real and the virtual, between vitality and representation. ROHTKO is a spectacular theatre production with loud beats and an intimate live film at once.