Some might wonder why, in 2025, yet another documentary about Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite propagandist, is needed. The answer, provided by Riefenstahl filmmaker Andres Veiel during a Q&A (which you can watch below) at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival (where his film was featured on the fest’s annual Docs to Watch panel), is simple: none of the others had access to Riefenstahl’s own personal archive.
Riefenstahl director Andres Veiel
Arno_Declair
Riefenstahl died in 2003 at the age of 101, but it wasn’t until Horst Kettner, her much younger longtime partner, passed away in 2016, that such a film became possible. At that time, Riefenstahl’s archive — some 700 boxes of text, audio and video — came into the possession of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, with whom producer Sandra Maischberger struck a deal: in return for first-look privileges, she and a team of filmmakers would review all of the materials and make them the subject of a film.
After that, Veiel, a veteran of highly ambitious docs, was convinced to sign on as director and embarked on a years-long effort not just to catalogue Riefenstahl’s materials, but also to suss out the degree to which they reflected reality. As he discusses during this Q&A, the brilliant but deceptive trailblazing female filmmaker did indeed curate the items to try to burnish her legacy — but couldn’t keep the underlying truth hidden from him and his collaborators.