Doha Film Festival 2025

The Christophers

Out of Competition - Doha Film Festival 2025

Steven Soderbergh / United States of America, United Kingdom / 2025 / 100 min / Unknown / DCP / In English / Arabic subtitles
Themes: Comedy, Drama
Rated: Mature subject matter. Not suitable for minors. Individuals under the age of 18 are not admitted into cinemas.

Description

Eight unfinished canvases sit in storage, the remnants of a myth and a career that flared during Britain’s 1960s–70s pop-art boom. Desperate for an inheritance, two siblings recruit a gifted restorer, once a forger, to finish the series and return the works to hiding, ready to be “found” when their father dies. To reach them, she insinuates herself into the artist’s house and daily routine, discovering a fortress of clutter, caustic humour and a man armoured by wit, vanity and fear, an icon who has stopped painting yet cannot stop performing.

The encounter becomes a duel conducted in sentences and brushstrokes. She studies the work like a conservator, layer by layer, gesture by gesture, until technique reveals biography, and mimicry shades into authorship. As the restorer’s eye parses, the artist is confronted by the one critique he has avoided, honest appraisal from someone who understands both the craft and the cost of making. He parries with provocation, unwilling to cede authority even as his children scheme around him. Dry, acerbic and humane, the piece observes the economics of talent and the intimacy of criticism, finding drama in the fragile space where restoration meets creation, and where a forged line can tell a truer story than the original ever did.

Director

Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh is a writer, director, producer, cinematographer and editor. He won the Academy Award for directing ‘Traffic’ (2000) and was nominated the same year for ‘Erin Brockovich’. His debut, ‘Sex, Lies, and Videotape’, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. His wide-ranging credits include ‘Behind The Candelabra’, ‘K Street’, ‘The Knick’, ‘Magic Mike’, ‘Kimi’, ‘Logan Lucky’, ‘Contagion’ and ‘The Girlfriend Experience’. This film marks his fourth collaboration with Ed Solomon, after ‘Mosaic’, ‘Full Circle’ and ‘No Sudden Move’.

Credits

Screenwriter

Ed Solomon

Producer

Jim Parks & Iain A. Canning

Editor

Corey Bayes

Cast

Michaela Coel as Lori Butler Ian Mckellen as Julian Sklar Jessica Gunning as Sallie Milton Sklar James Corden as Barnaby Sklar

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