My Kid Could Paint That

My Kid Could Paint That (2007) — watch online on iFILM — is Amir Bar-Lev's documentary about Marla Olmstead, a four-year-old from Binghamton, New York, whose abstract paintings sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, with critics drawing comparisons to early Picasso. The child painted in the living room; the art world queued up to buy.

Then 60 Minutes ran a piece asking whether Marla had really been working alone. Bar-Lev had been filming the family before the story broke — and found himself inside a situation he could no longer read clearly. The film ends up less about child prodigy than about how fast a media narrative gets built and how much damage that speed does to everyone inside the frame. Stream My Kid Could Paint That online on iFILM.