‘Riefenstahl’ Documentary Director Andres Veiel Interview

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 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.