Reflecting Images - Masters

Reflecting Images is IDFA's largest non-competitive film program, divided into three sections: Best of Fests, Masters and Panorama. In Masters, the festival keeps track of its favorite, established documentary filmmakers.
 

1929

Director William Karel examines the biggest stock market crash in history, which occurred on the New York Stock Exchange 80 years ago -- Black Thursday, October 24, 1929. In this film, a wide range...

Audition, The

The American director Susan Froemke followed 11 finalists in an opera competition organized by the Metropolitan Opera of New York. These are exciting times in the lives of the young singers, who want...

Capitalism: A Love Story

Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story opens with a bank robbery accompanied by the sound of "Louie Louie" by Richard Berry. The message is clear: 21st-century capitalism's motto is "Take what you...

Crude

It is called the Chernobyl Disaster of the Amazon: the systematic destruction and pollution of the Ecuadorian rainforest, all because of oil extraction that began in the early 1970s. In the minds of...

danse - The Paris Opera Ballet, La

After exploring the American Ballet Theatre (Ballet, 1995) and the Comédie Française (La Comédie Française ou l'amour joué, 1996) in the mid-1990s, Frederick Wiseman now offers us a portrait of the...

Defamation

"I saw what my grandmother felt, but I didn't share those feelings with her," explains the Israeli grandson of a Holocaust survivor. For director Yoav Shamir, born and bred in Israel, it is a...

Farm: 10 Down, The

The Angola Prison in the state of Louisiana is the oldest and biggest prison in the U.S. Ninety-five percent of the 1,500 prisoners will never be released. In 1997, director Jonathan Stack spent a...

Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould,

This biopic about legendary Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932-1982) contains a surprising amount of previously unseen footage, such as the short film of Gould in the Caribbean. Still renowned for...

Hunger

Never before has food production been as high as it is today. All the same, there are still increasing numbers of people suffering from starvation. The urban poor in Haiti eat pies that consist...

Kids Grow Up, The

In 51 Birch Street (2005), director Doug Block discovered that he hardly knew his parents at all: three months after the death of his mother, his father remarried his former secretary and suddenly...

Kings of Pastry

The best pastry chefs in all of France compete each year for the "Collar," a prize that takes its mental, physical, and emotional toll on the contestants. In the big restaurants, they are called the...

Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant, The

On June 3, 2008, a shockwave tore through the General Motors factory near Dayton, Ohio when it was announced that it would be closing down. It had been producing 280,000 large cars annually since...

Mars Dreamers

The astronomers, geologists, space architects, astrobiologists, computer science students, writers and physicists who get the floor in Swiss director Richard Dindo's Mars Dreamers have one thing in...

Oil City Confidential,

The band that was punk before punk even existed. That's how Dr. Feelgood is described in Oil City Confidential, a stylized portrait of the British punk-rock band. The members of the band grew up in...

Scientists under Attack - Science in the Magnetic Field of Money

Increasingly, the potatoes, tomatoes, corn, and other vegetable products that we buy in the supermarket are genetically modified. Food inspection authorities and biologists experimenting with the...

Shock Doctrine, The

This is the screen version of the newest book of the same name by Canadian journalist and activist Naomi Klein, renowned for No Logo. In The Shock Doctrine, Klein argues that the rise of capitalism...

Those Who Remain

With the constant flow of workers illegally entering the United States from Mexico, many wives and children are left behind. Uncertain about the fate of their loved ones, these women and children...

YOU CANNOT START WITHOUT ME - Valery Gergiev - Maestro

In the Netherlands, Valery Gergiev is known principally as the head conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, a position he held from 1995 to 2008. But Gergiev has many more strings to his...