One of the world’s most notorious art heists is getting a true crime documentary from Studiocanal.
“The Paris-Tokyo Job (Or How To Rob A Yakuza),” a four-part series, is set to debut at La Rochelle’s Sunny Side of the Doc festival this month before bowing on Canal+ in France later this year.
The doc tells the story of Philippe “Fifi” Jamin, a flamboyant delinquent who became an international fugitive in the 1980s after his gang began stealing and trafficking world-famous artworks, including paintings by Corot, becoming entangled with the Japanese Yakuza in the process.
It is written and directed by Jérémie Rozan (“Gold Brick”) and Jérôme Pierrat (“Cocaine Air: Smugglers at 30,000 Feet”) and produced by Philippe de Bourbon and Andaman Films.
“When Claude Monet’s ‘Impression, Sunrise,’ valued at more than €100 million, is spectacularly stolen, the gang become the main suspect and pursued by law enforcement worldwide,” reads the logline. “Along the way, they will pull off one of Japan’s most audacious robberies: the 1986 Mitsubishi Bank heist in Tokyo, netting 300 million yen (almost €7 million today) and earning the label ‘heist of the century.’”
The docu-series, which is also available as a two-hour standalone documentary, spans Tokyo, Bangkok and Mexico and combines cinematic storytelling, rare archival material, reconstructions and exclusive first-hand testimony to trace Fifi’s rise and fall as the police swiftly close in.
The documentary is set to be presented as part of Studiocanal’s slate of premium factual content. Sunny Side of the Doc runs from June 22 to 27.