For over a thousand years, a set of extraordinary 12th-century marble panels stood in Ghazni, Afghanistan; intricate relics from one of the medieval world's great centres of art and learning. Then came the wars, the occupations, the chaos. One by one, the panels vanished. Today they sit in museums across the world, beautifully lit, behind glass, and very far from home. The Theft is the story of how they got there, and the explosive debate over whether they should ever go back.

But this is not a simple story of villains and victims. Repatriation is one of the biggest fault lines in today's cultural world, with nations from Greece to Nigeria squaring off against the British Museum, the Met, and the Louvre over objects taken during war and colonial rule. The Theft goes straight to one of the sharpest edges of that debate: what happens when the country demanding its treasures back is governed by the Taliban, a regime with its own catastrophic record of cultural destruction?

Filmed with rare access inside the Afghanistan National Museum in Kabul, The Theft follows former museum director Mohammad Fahim Rahimi, who has risked his life to protect Afghan artefacts through bombings and regime change, as he reveals a world most will never otherwise see. Together with curators, scholars, and artists across continents, the film reframes the repatriation debate to ask, why do artefacts matter? What is lost when objects are removed from the cultures that gave them meaning? And should these panels really be returned to Afghanistan, despite the Taliban's own catastrophic history of destruction?