Riefenstahl

Directed by Andres Veiel, this German documentary sets Leni Riefenstahl's account of herself against evidence drawn from her own archive. The film exists because of an inheritance: when her partner died in 2016 her sole heir donated the estate to a cultural foundation, and the producer negotiated access to the material in exchange for the expertise to catalogue it, with the team spending six years working through more than seven hundred boxes. The most striking find is this: Riefenstahl insisted all her life that she had never read Mein Kampf, but the documentary surfaces a 1934 newspaper interview in which she describes buying it and says that after the first page she was already a convinced National Socialist. The critical detail is that the interview turned up in British newspaper archives and not in the estate she curated herself, meaning she had weeded her own papers. The archive also holds thirty hours of recorded phone calls in which former Nazis offered her moral support after the war, and cordial conversations with Hitler's architect. The film screened at Venice, the same festival that gave prizes to Triumph of the Will in 1935 and Olympia in 1938. It holds ninety seven percent on Rotten Tomatoes, though Variety noted the evidence remains circumstantial. Who it's for: Anyone interested in the history of propaganda and in how an artist constructs her own past. Who it's not for: Not for viewers wanting a definitive verdict, since the film presents a case file rather than a conviction.