Leni Riefenstahl

Explores Leni Riefenstahl's artistic legacy and her complex ties to the Nazi regime, juxtaposing her self-portrayal with evidence suggesting awareness of the regime's atrocities.

Countless people around the world know the pictures from Leni Riefenstahl's films, even if they have not seen them in their entirety. The work of the German director has burned itself into the collective memory. Even decades after the end of the Nazi era, she showed no remorse and presented herself as an apolitical, naive follower of the Nazi criminal regime. Her artistic service for the cinema was always recognized. But book author Nina Gladitz shows after decades of research that Hitler's favorite filmmaker was not only a follower, but also a perpetrator during the Third Reich, who instrumentalized other filmmakers such as the brilliant cinematographer Willy Zielke in order to gain fame for herself.

Six sequences about Fascism and its segments throughout history.

City of Toys (2024, 39mins) combines Alan Marcus’ 2001 interview with legendary filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl with an exploration of centuries of antisemitism. As she recalls of her iconic 1935 documentary, Triumph of the Will, on the annual Nuremberg Nazi Party Rally almost seventy years later: “I had no ideals. I only did my duty. It was a commission I carried out.” Beyond its notoriety in 20th century history, Nuremberg was also known as one of the toymaking capitals of the world and until the Nazi era many of its major toymakers were Jewish. Nuremberg still hosts the world’s largest trade toy fair. The film subtly intertwines narratives on Adolf Hitler and Riefenstahl’s representation of the Nazi movement with Nuremberg’s historical bedrock of antisemitism and the role of its Jewish toymakers. As film historian Robert Rosenstone has written of Marcus’ work, “I would call it a kind of poetic history that may in fact deny the possibility of history at all.”

Winston Churchill understood the power of films, but the true extent of his use of cinema as a propaganda tool is rarely explored. In 1934, one of Britain's most celebrated film producers, Alexander Korda, signed Churchill up as a screenwriter and historical advisor. It was the start of a unique collaboration. Churchill provided script notes for Korda's productions and penned an epic screenplay. When war broke out, their collaboration took on national importance. Korda was sent on a mission to Hollywood to help bring America into the war, with positive results. With access to previously undiscovered documents, this film documentary examines that mission and a friendship that underpinned a unique, creative partnership.

Film journalist and critic Rüdiger Suchsland examines German cinema from 1933, when the Nazis came into power, until 1945, when the Third Reich collapsed. (A sequel to From Caligari to Hitler, 2015.)

The play is an atypical story about Leni Riefenstahl, Adolf Hitler's court director, one of the best filmmakers in the world, who rose to fame thanks to films commissioned by the Third Reich. The character of Leni was portrayed by Zdena Studénková in the drama of the Slovak National Theatre. The original Slovak play Leni by Valerie Schulczová and Roman Olekšák is about a fictional meeting of two real people. The legendary presenter Johnny Carson, whose "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" was one of the most watched talk shows in America for thirty years, and the controversial Leni Riefenstahl, Adolf Hitler's "court director". It's 1974, Johnny is at the height of his career, and Leni is in America presenting her first completed project since the defeat of Germany - a book of photographs from Africa - Last of Nubu. But Johnny knows what his audience is more interested in than art.

The forgotten story of Son Kee Chung, the Korean athlete who won a gold medal under Japanese flag in marathon at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

In the three years leading up to the Olympics, the Nazi regime saw sport as an invaluable mobilisation and propaganda tool to motivate the "master race". Whether sympathisers or followers, German athletes went along with it; however, a number of them came to regret their decisions.

No synopsis available yet.

A fascinating chronology of 100 years of mountain film history in the Alps. This documentary focuses primarily on films shot on the Matterhorn, the Eiger, and the Grandes Jorasses, considered until the 1930s as the "last problems of the Alps," and shows the evolution of mountain filmmaking through numerous excerpts from documentaries and feature films – notably on the Matterhorn in 1901. The genre, appropriated as a means of mass exaltation by "fascist" regimes during the Second World War, was reinvented in the 1950s by Gaston Rebuffat, Marcel Ichac, and Lionel Terray in the Mont Blanc massif, avant-garde figures of French mountain cinema, who reintroduced, beyond performance, the values ​​of the mountains – and in color – poetry, humor, and sharing among people from all walks of life.

At the age of 97 Riefenstahl returns to Sudan for one final farewell to the Nuba that she lived with for 8 months and photographed and filmed extensively. Müller documents her return after 23 years away and her reaction to the collapsing culture that she once celebrated so avidly in her photographs.

The Nazi propaganda mastermind behind Hitler speaks in first person as actor Kenneth Branagh reads pages of the diary kept by the chief of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, revealing the man's most inner thoughts.

From Stag Beetle to Swastika narrates in a richly detailed, associative montage the boundless possibilities of manipulating images and using images to seduce.

Documentary continuing Breloer's exploration of Speer's life, focusing on the post-Spandau years.

This film is about the responsibility of artists and art that can lead to genocide.

An interview with infamous German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl carried out by Sandra Maischberger in preparation for the subject's 100th birthday, and the release of not only her final film, but her first film in 48 years.

Deep-sea diver/former propagandist Leni Riefenstahl explores the undersea world of coral reefs in various oceans around the world.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

This documentary recounts the life and work of one of most famous, and yet reviled, German film directors in history, Leni Riefenstahl. The film recounts the rise of her career from a dancer, to a movie actor to the most important film director in Nazi Germany who directed such famous propaganda films as Triumph of the Will and Olympiad. The film also explores her later activities after Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945 and her disgrace for being so associated with it which includes her amazingly active life over the age of 90.

A meditation on the first 100 years of German cinema, featuring an assembly of German filmmakers.

An investigation of Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous film production of “Tiefland” during the Holocaust, one which used Sinti extras under forced labor conditions. After filming finished in 1944, these extras were sent to Auschwitz. Nina Gladitz interviews the survivors and perpetrators, wondering if Riefenstahl knew this would happen at the end of production. Tiefland was filmed from 1940-1944 but was not released until 1954. Leni Riefenstahl sued Gladitz over the documentary.

Edited from almost 100 km of film footage shot during the Games, this feature documentary is a breathtaking portrait of the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Much more than a simple record of the Games, the film approaches each event with the intention of revealing the athlete - whether winner or loser - as a unique individual.

The film tells the cultural story of Berlin during the Weimar Republic through interviews with a number of persons who were involved in literature, film, art, and music during the period. It includes interviews with Christopher Isherwood, Louise Brooks, Lotte Eisner, Elisabeth Bergner, Francis Lederer, Carl Zuckmayer, Gregor Piatigorsky, Claudio Arrau, Rudolf Kolisch, Mischa Spoliansky, Herbert Bayer, Mrs. Walter Gropius, and Arthur Koestler.

A semi-documentary account of the author Thomas Wolfe's trip to Berlin in the summer of 1936.

In early 20th Century Europe, a dancer becomes the romantic bone of contention between two men, a humble shepherd and an imperious marquis.

Junta is hated by the people in the village where she lives, especially by the women, who suspect her of being a witch. Only she can climb the nearby mountains to a cave high up, whence a mysterious blue light glows when the moon is full. Many young men of the village have died trying to follow her. She is driven out of town, and takes to living in the mountains. Eventually she shares the secret of the blue light with one man, and he betrays it.

Starting with a long and lyrical overture, evoking the origins of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, Riefenstahl covers twenty-one athletic events in the first half of this two-part love letter to the human body and spirit, culminating with the marathon, where Jesse Owens became the first track and field athlete to win four gold medals in a single Olympics.

Hannes is employed at the Mont Blanc Observatory; the only outside connection is a pilot and Hella over the radio. Hella ascends the mountain but her father dies along the way.

An expedition goes in search of a party lost in the Arctic a year earlier. (The English-language version of S.O.S. Eisberg.)

An expedition goes in search of a party lost in the Arctic a year earlier.

The exploits of village girl Hannes and her attempts to master skiing and ski-jumping aided by the local expert.

Dr. Johannes Krafft climbs a 12,000-foot mountain over and over again to search for his wife, who was lost on their honeymoon. Another couple makes the dangerous climb with him.

No synopsis available yet.

In the mountains, Diotima meets Karl and fall in love and have an affair. Karl's friend Vigo mistakenly believes she's in love with him, causing rifts in all relationships.

The perfect body as an object of cult worship. Based on the mass sports and body worship movement of the 1920s, the film propagates physical training and shows in stylized documentary scenes aspects of physical hygiene, gymnastics, sports and dancing as well as scenes in which supposed sportsmen of antiquity pose naked.

A young Italian girl living in the Dolomites falls in love with a member of a tourist party skiing on the nearby mountains.