Amir Bar Lev is a director of documentary films who has made the rounds at film festivals with his movies, including his 2000 directorial debut Fighter, about Czech Holocaust survivors Jan Wiener and Arnost Lustig. He’s also directed the 2010 domestic documentary finalist The Tillman Story, about NFL safety Pat Tillman, who gave up his pro football career to serve in the Army Rangers and was killed in a friendly fire incident two years later.

Bar-Lev went to Binghamton, N.Y., to make a movie about young Marla Olmstead, whose huge abstract canvases drew comparisons to Jackson Pollock and were selling for thousands of dollars each. But the project took an unexpected turn a few months into shooting when 60 Minutes ran a segment that cast doubt on whether the child did the paintings herself, or at least was substantially helped by her father. Bar-Lev’s access to the family allows him to capture their conflicted reactions to the crisis — at once nurturing and exploitative.

Art audiences will quibble that, despite a good deal of expert testimony from the likes of New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman, Bar-Lev fails to resolve whether or not the paintings really are legit, as well as how they were created. But the film’s characters will hold interest on big and small screens — a father in over his head, a mother who retreats from the media circus, a local artist/dealer who markets the child, a reporter who warns that Bar-Lev may be slurping up the public spigot.  אמיר בר לב