Forged — Day 34

Genre: Drama / Psychological Thriller

Plot:  A woman is named as the new Director of a major Modern Art museum that has fallen a bit behind the times. The appointment is the toast of the art world since the woman's mother, now in her 80s, had previously served as the director of the same museum for nearly 30 years, achieving legendary success in her time.

One day, during her first few weeks as museum director, a deranged man comes in and slashes a priceless masterpiece with a razor blade. As the man is dragged away and arrested he shouts things about the museum's dark legacy, and the righting of injustices against him. The museum's conservationists begin the delicate work of repairing the masterpiece, hopeful that it can still be saved.

Late one night, a few weeks into the restoration process, one of the chief conservationist's calls the director down to the basement repair shop and drops a bombshell. After three weeks of close inspection the conservationist is convinced that the legendary painting is actually a forgery. He walks the director through his findings step by step, until she is convinced. The director asks the man to keep his discovery between the two of them for now while she investigates further. 

The director begins a quiet inquiry in to the provenance of the work, and to her dawning horror, discovers that it was actually just one of at least 40 masterworks purchased through unverified channels over a 20 year period. The works in question are some of the museum's most prized possessions, with a total insurance value in the Billions, and all of them were acquired during her mother's tenure as director.

As the museum presses charges against the man who defaced the painting, he falls unexpectedly silent in court and refuses to speak in his own defense. But some troubling details begin to emerge about the man. He is a Greek national and for a time was suspected of associating with a ring of world class art forgers.

The director approaches her mother with all this this troubling news, but her mother demurs. As her daughter presses the issue, the mother takes offense, and tries to convince her daughter that she is on a witch hunt. Drop the charges against the lunatic and forget about the one painting that is a confirmed forgery, she advises. If the daughter goes digging looking for dirt who knows what she could find? And even if there are no other forgeries in the museum's collection, if the daughter expands the inquiry, she risks destroying both women's reputations in the process. 

But the director is compelled to see it through. Eventually her investigation reveals that her mother and the slasher have met, in fact, numerous times. A private detective brings the director even more disturbing news: he believes the slasher is not just associated with a forgery ring, but in all likelihood he is himself the most infamous, never-been-caught master forger of the last half century.

The implications are devastating. Is it possible that the mother and the infamous forger were working together as partners, swindling one of the greatest institutions in the world out of millions of dollars? If so, where did the money go? Can the great institution survive if the truth comes out? By the time the daughter unearths the truth, that her mother and the master forger were intimate for many years, she has an even greater fear: Is it possible that the forger—who is on the verge of destroying the director's career, her mother's legacy, and the museum itself—might actually be her father?