As you might expect, Riefenstahl is a documentary about Leni Riefenstahl, “Hitler’s favourite film-maker”. The director of Triumph of the Will and Olympia, Riefenstahl’s career was first boosted and then destroyed by her association with the Führer. She insisted to the grim end – she died aged 101 in 2003 – that she was enthusiastic for Hitler at the time because all Germans were, nothing more or less.
Director Andres Veiel had access to the Riefenstahl estate and so is able to include material that’s not been seen or heard before – interviews blowing up spectacularly when Riefenstahl loses her rag and telephone conversations with supporters, including Albert Speer. Veiel largely takes the combative Riefenstahl at her word – that she was a jobbing director who would have have done the same for Stalin or Roosevelt if they’d commissioned her. He finds points in her favour – she was never a Nazi party member, for instance, and that she may have cosied up to Hitler out of professional ambition rather than ideological fervour.
Veiel gets close but not quite close enough. He knows he’s not quite got a glove on Riefenstahl but he’s in good company. His film is not unlike Gitta Sereny’s remarkable book Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, which interviewed Hitler’s former architect and armaments minister at punishing length and never quite landed the knockout blow, Speer scampering away from revelation while appearing to open up. Riefenstahl does the same thing, as is demonstrated in repeated interview footage down the years: she is apparently frank but never really offers new information – hostages to fortune are not going to be just given away.
This makes for lean-in viewing. Will Veiel, delving through 60-plus years of interview from 1937 to 1999 and ancient archive footage, find a contradiction, a telling factoid, an admission of something?
The film breaks down into two halves, giving us the beef first – the 1935 Nazi propaganda movie Triumph of the Will, all the Hitler-associated stuff, before running a more conventional chronological biography. The ambitious mother, the brutal father, the stage career, film actress, back to Hitler again. We pause momentarily at Olympia, her film about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which invented much of sports documentary technique and is enough on its own to cement her reputation as one of the greats. The African American athlete Jesse Owens, we learn, “electrified” Riefenstahl. “They were very well built and moved like big cats,” she says. “They” being black people.
And then, post-War, her career in ruins, she attempts to rebuild. Finishes her film Tiefland in 1954, though no one is too interested in it. Photographs the Nuba people in Africa – also well built and moving like cats – in two celebrated books of photographs undertaken when she was in her 60s. Took up scuba diving and underwater film-making when most people are in a care home, and along with a partner 40 years her junior, lived a life of adventure, documenting their lives together, always working.
In an interview late in her life, when she’s approaching 100, she’s asked about the rise of the far right and the rioting on the streets of Germany against migrants. She shakes her head in sorrow.
Veiel repeatedly cuts to telephone conversations with admirers. She listens patiently as one old Nazi or young sympathiser says things out loud that Germans do not say in public. Though she offers no succour (and surely aware this is all “on the record”), she does occasionally indulge her callers with blame-shifting – we were all taken in, kind of thing.
The most striking bit of footage comes about halfway through. In an uncomfortable 1976 TV interview, Riefenstahl finds herself sitting next to Elfriede Kretschmer, an anti-Nazi activist in the Hitler era who is insistent that every German in their 30s at the time – as she and Riefenstahl both were – knew what was going on in the death camps. “How does someone end up shooting films like that… Pied Piper films” Kretschmer asks her. That’s the charge that sticks – Riefenstahl as Pied Piper. She knows it’s true, and you can tell by the look on her face. Maybe Veiel lands a blow after all.
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
