The Nazi film propagandist Leni Riefenstahl remained a true believer in the party her entire life, and may have played an active role in at least one mass slaughter of Jews, according to a new documentary that seeks to upend accepted wisdom about the filmmaker’s complicity in Nazi atrocities.
“Riefenstahl,” which premiered Thursday at the Venice Film Festival to rave reviews, is a fresh look at the “Triumph of the Will” director, who died in 2003 at the age of 101. The film draws on access to Riefenstahl’s personal archive, which was only recently made available to the public after the death of her husband in 2016.
Director Andres Veiel focuses on dismantling the narrative Riefenstahl had carefully refashioned for herself in the postwar era: that of a naive German artist who only worked for Hitler because those were the resources available to her, and who was shocked to learn of the full scale of Nazi atrocities after the war. Riefenstahl, who later enjoyed a long career as a photographer, encouraged this rehabilitation by publishing her memoirs and commissioning a documentary much more favorable to her in the 1990s.
But Veiel and his producer Sandra Maischberger, who interviewed Riefenstahl for her 100th birthday in 2002, say that image of the filmmaker isn’t true — and present new evidence they say shows her complicit in and largely aware of the Nazis’ aims.
* The Jewish Telegraphic Agency contributed to this article.
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