F for Fake

F for Fake is an essay film by Orson Welles that examines forgery and deception through the stories of two notorious fraudsters. Elmyr de Hory was an art forger whose copies of works by painters such as Picasso and Matisse were sold as originals, fooling experts and museums for years. Clifford Irving wrote a biography of de Hory, and later became famous himself for a fabricated autobiography of the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. Welles appears on screen as himself, narrating and reflecting on these cases while blending documentary material with staged sequences, including scenes with Oja Kodar.

The film was directed by Welles and François Reichenbach, who also wrote the screenplay together, with Dominique Antoine producing. It was released in 1973, after Welles's earlier features including Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight, and after Reichenbach's J'ai tout donné. It was shot partly in de Hory's villa on Ibiza and partly in France and Germany. The cast mixes real participants with actors: de Hory and Irving play themselves, alongside Welles, Kodar and Laurence Harvey among roughly twenty-five credited performers.

On IMDb, the film holds a rating of 7.7 from around 20,000 votes, while on TMDB it has a 7.4 from 376 votes. A critics' rating of 8 out of 10 from 52 reviews places it somewhat above the audience scores on both platforms. Its runtime is 89 minutes.