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In the alluring art-world documentary “My Rembrandt,” someone describes the experience of being in sudden, direct proximity to a Rembrandt portrait of a standing figure. He says that it was spooky, like seeing a live human loom right up in front of him. Rembrandt, who painted images of astonishing dark tactile severity, was the mesmeric psychologist of the Old Masters. When you look at one of his paintings, the face it shows is so specific, so lived-in, so there that we seem to be peering directly into the soul of the person it depicts. “My Rembrandt” is a documentary that revels, as any good Rembrandt documentary should, in the extraordinarily subtle majesty with which Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, who lived from 1606 to 1669, teased out the living essence of those he painted.

Yet the movie is also about money, power, and the elusive mystique of “value.” The Dutch filmmaker Oeke Hoogendijk...

Variety has been given exclusive access to the trailer to “My Rembrandt,” directed by Oeke Hoogendijk, which has its world premiere on Sunday in the Masters section of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (Idfa).

The film is set in the world of the art market for paintings by the Dutch Old Master. While art collectors such as Eijk and Rose-Marie De Mol van Otterloo, the American Thomas Kaplan and the Scottish Duke of Buccleuch show us their special connection with “their” Rembrandt, French baron Eric de Rothschild puts two Rembrandts up for sale, triggering a tough political battle between the Rijksmuseum and the Louvre.

The film also follows aristocratic Dutch art dealer Jan Six as he seems to be on the trail of not just one but two “new” Rembrandt paintings. This nerve-wrecking journey of discovery seems to be the realization of his biggest boyhood dream. But when he is...