LONDON.- Dogwoof announced the release of award-winning filmmaker Andreas Koefoed’s The Lost Leonardo, which will screen in cinemas across the UK & Ireland from 10 September 2021. This captivating film, which premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival, charts the sensational inside story behind the controversial and divisive Salvator Mundi, the most expensive painting ever sold at $450 million.

From the moment the painting is bought for $1175 at a shady New Orleans auction house, and the restorer discovers masterful Renaissance brushstrokes under the heavy varnish of its cheap restoration, the Salvator Mundi’s fate is determined by an insatiable quest for fame, money and power. As its price soars, so do questions about its authenticity: is this painting really by Leonardo da Vinci?

Unravelling the hidden agendas of the richest men and most powerful art institutions in the world, The Lost Leonardo reveals how vested interests in the Salvator Mundi are of such tremendous power that truth becomes secondary.

In 2008, the world’s most distinguished Leonardo Da Vinci experts gathered around an easel at London’s National Gallery to examine a mysterious painting – an unassuming Salvator Mundi (Latin for ‘Savior of the World’). Despite not seeking further experts’ formal opinions, the National Gallery presented the Salvator Mundi, referred to by some as the ‘male Mona Lisa’, as an autograph1 Leonardo da Vinci painting in their 2011 blockbuster exhibition, setting in motion one of the most beguiling and perplexing art stories of our time.

Filmed over a three-year period, The Lost Leonardo meticulously unveils the story behind the Salvator Mundi and unfolds as a real-life thriller featuring major characters from the world of art, finance, crime and politics, including the restorer Dianne Modestini – who speaks in the film about her role in the evolution of the painting for the first time.

Director Andreas Koefoed positions this stranger-than-fiction story squarely at the intersection of capitalism and myth-making, posing the question: is this multi-million dollar painting actually by Leonardo, or do certain powerful players simply want it to be?

Says film director Andreas Koefoed: “This is a film about the incredible journey of a painting, the Salvator Mundi, the Saviour of the World, possibly by Leonardo da Vinci. It is a true story, yet a fairytale worthy of H.C. Andersen: A damaged painting, neglected for centuries, is fortuitously rediscovered and soon after praised as a long-lost masterpiece of divine beauty. At its peak in the spotlight, it is decried as a fake, but what is revealed most of all is that the world around it is fake, driven by cynical powers and money.”