The Zaks Affair: Anatomy of a Fake Collection

One of the main paintings featured in the documentary, titled "The Clockmaker", was originally purporting to be painted by Soviet-era artist Ivan Kliun. The documentary shows the painting briefly appeared in two 2024 Oscar-winning films: Oppenheimer (2023) (Best Picture), and short film from the same year, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023) (Best Live Action Short Film); the first part of the four Roald Dahl 2023 Netflix shorts by director Wes Anderson.

The real painting is currently held by the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) museum, and is now thought to be a fake from a collection sold as part of a supply known as the "Zaks" collection.

The museum removed the painting from display in early 2024, during the making of this documentary, following serious doubts of its provenance expressed by several leading art historians and art technicians that Kliun was the actual painter of the work to which he was being attributed to (as he produced very few paintings in his matching Cubo-Futurism period, to which the work would belong, yet all his works from this period have been previously catalogued).