The Brokers
1987 · 29m · Canada
Directed by Peter Raymont
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Inside a major Canadian brokerage, traders and market specialists reveal how stock exchanges operate and shape the wider economy.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A sober, almost reverential doc about how markets actually work—which is exactly the kind of institutional transparency that's supposed to be boring, except Raymont finds something genuinely unsettling in letting traders just... explain themselves. It's subversive precisely because it refuses to sensationalize.
A formally restrained essay film that locates itself squarely in the tradition of institutional documentary—Wiseman's observational rigor meets the structural clarity of economic cinema—where the editing rhythm and witness testimony create a portrait of systems that shape us, all without editorial grandstanding.
The singular choice here is pure restraint: Raymont never cuts away from the traders' faces, lets the market language sit uncommented, and trusts that proximity itself becomes revelation—a technical discipline that transforms what could've been corporate PR into something genuinely disquieting.