French Docuseries Revisits the Marmottan Heist That Put Monet in the Crosshairs
A theft that once read like pulp fiction is heading to television. Studiocanal has announced a four-part docuseries, “The Paris-Tokyo Job (Or How To Rob A Yakuza),” which will premiere at the Sunny Side of the Doc festival in late June before a wider release later this year.
Written and directed by Jérémie Rozan and Jérôme Pierrat, the series follows Philippe “Fifi” Jamin, a former member of a Paris gang that began with car theft and moved into art crime. The story reaches back to the late 1970s, when Jamin met Shuinichi Fujikuma in prison. Fujikuma had been jailed for drug trafficking, and the two men allegedly devised a transnational scheme: steal works in France, then move them into a Japanese market hungry for blue-chip Western art.
The documentary centers on the 1985 theft from the Marmottan Museum in Paris, where five masked gunmen took nine Impressionist paintings, including Claude Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise” (1872). In the promotional materials, the painting is described as valued at more than €100 million. The same materials also frame the case as the starting point for a wider chain of robberies that linked France and Japan through art, money, and organized crime.
The film also revisits an earlier theft in 1984, when Jamin’s crew stole five paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot from the Musée de Semur-en-Auxois in east-central France. That case remained unresolved until 1987, when Fujikuma was arrested in Tokyo over the theft of dozens of fur coats and, under questioning, reportedly disclosed information about the Corot works. Four of the five paintings were eventually recovered.
Investigators later connected Jamin and his associates to the 1986 Mitsubishi Bank heist in Tokyo, in which 300 million yen was taken. The promotional materials call it the “heist of the century.” Ballestrazzi’s work in Japan eventually led to the discovery of the missing Marmottan paintings in a Corsican apartment in 1990, though Jamin and his associates have consistently denied involvement.
The case also left visible damage behind. One stolen Monet required only minor treatment, while Berthe Morisot’s “Young Girl at the Ball” was badly damaged. More than a crime story, the series appears poised to examine how art theft can become a shadow history of taste, money, and international exchange.
