Exit Through the Gift Shop: Painting the town red

Exit Through the Gift Shop is a moving film that caught many an eye at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

One of the most provocative films about art ever made, Exit Through the Gift Shop is a fascinating study of low-level criminality, comradeship and incompetence.  By turns shocking, hilarious and absurd, this is an enthralling modern-day fairy tale.

This film is an inside story of Street Art – a brutal and revealing account of what happens when fame, money and vandalism collide. The film follows an eccentric shop-keeper turned amateur film-maker as he attempts to capture many of the world’s most infamous vandals on camera, only to have a British stencil artist named Banksy turn the camcorder back on its owner with wildly unexpected results.

Exit Through the Gift Shop, is a Banksy Film that tells the story of Thierry Guetta, a French immigrant in Los Angeles , and his obsession with street art . The film premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2010 and has previously been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature  at the 83rd Academy Awards. BANKSYFILM.COM



Reviews that the film received

The New York Times said, “The film is relentlessly entertaining, a fascinating document of work whose life span is commonly determined by city councils.”

The Greason Awards said the film was, “A flawlessly made film; original and insightful, asks questions rather than telling you what to think and at the same time, is very funny.”

The Los Angeles Times wrote, “Subversive, provocative and unexpected, that takes you by surprise, starting quietly but ending up in a hall of mirrors as unsettling as anything Lewis Carroll’s Alice ever experienced.”

The Entertainment Weekly called the film, “a marvelous, one-of-a-kind contraption, a madly spinning top of a movie that keeps zigging and zagging and taking the audience right along with it”.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 21^st, 2011.