RIEFENSTAHL (2025) review
written by: Andres Veiel
produced by: Sandra Maischberger
directed by: Andres Veiel
rated: not rated
runtime: 115 min.
U.S. release date: September 5, 2025 (limited)
Leni Riefenstahl. You may have heard the name before. If not, you may have heard of her 1935 German propaganda film “Triumph of the Will”, which the German filmmaker directed after being commissioned by Hitler. If not, the somber documentary “Riefenstahl” will, for some, serve as a gateway to one of the most controversial filmmakers of all time. At the same time, those who knew her will likely gain a greater, albeit nauseating, understanding of the innovative artist.
Undoubtedly, it will be hard to separate the art from the artist after viewing “Riefenstahl”, a film directed by Andres Veiel and produced by Sandra Maischberger, both Germans. It’s a striking and fascinating look at not just Riefenstahl as an artist, but also her ideology. It will prompt viewers to consider the responsibility artists have when creating art for the world to see.
Riefenstahl died in September 2003 at age 101 after a long cancer diagnosis. A year prior, she was interviewed by Maischberger to mark the special occasion of Reifenstahl becoming a centenarian. The interview was broadcast simultaneously in Germany and France on Arte (a European public service channel focusing on culture) in August 2002, under the title “Sandra Maischberger meets Leni Riefenstahl.” According to Maischberger, there were definitely times when she felt Riefenstahl was lying and didn’t feel she was able to get much out of her. That interview prompted Maischberger to delve deeper into Riefenstahl’s past, which led to the idea of a documentary.
By 2018, Veiel joined Maischberger, who had begun a project involving the review of thousands of boxes that once belonged to Reifenstahl, to utilize the material for a documentary. The boxes contained notes, letters, memoir drafts, along with Super 8 recordings, film excerpts, photographs, and cassette tapes with telephone recordings. Veiel and his team of editors (composed of Stephan Krumbiegel, Olaf Voigtländer, and Alfredo Castro) came on board, joined by cinematographer Toby Cornish, in an effort to get a visualization of how the documentary would look.
Knowing all this lends some context to the fascination of how the titular subject is presented in “Riefenstahl.” Veiel and his crew have meticulously compiled pertinent information for his vision of how the documentary would look, utilizing archival footage that mainly consists of talk show interviews with Riefenstahl and audio recordings of either her or those who knew her. The goal here is to offer a different perspective on Riefenstahl, allowing viewers to form their own opinion of the director.
Like many documentaries, “Riefenstahl” has its own stance, but it never hits the audience over the head with it. The narrative Veiel constructs reveals how Riefenstahl’s warm reception in the decades following World War II was something she actively cultivated herself. She dismisses her role in capturing the Third Reich’s uprising by stating she would’ve done the same commissioned assignment for Stalin or Roosevelt.
Yet the information provided in “Riefenstahl” supports that her relationship with Nazi Germany was more than just a work-for-hire situation. There is well-documented information that she was hand-picked by Hitler after he saw her act in 1932’s “The Blue Light”, a black-and-white Aryan romantic fantasy which was also her directorial debut. That won the Führer over and secured Riefenstahl two historic directing commissions: “Triumph of the Will” in 1935, an obviously euphoric and grandiose account of the Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, and 1936’s “Olympia,” which followed the Berlin Games of that year in a ground-breaking stunning manner which found Riefenstahl effectively inventing the way modern-day Olympics would be captured going forward.
It’s well-documented that Reifenstahl spent a significant amount of time with Hitler and his associates, such as Joseph Goebbels, who was the chief Nazi propagandist for Hitler, and who assigned her commissions. So, whenever she’s on a talk show, downplaying the close relationship she had with the Nazi regime, she’s hoping no one will do their homework, because if they do, it’ll be easy to see how her work wound up glorifying and popularizing the Nazi movement more than anyone else. Reifenstahl has also stated that she never had a Nazi membership card, a claim that she considers an exoneration, but that didn’t stop her from becoming the only important woman in the Nazi movement. In these interviews, conducted from the 60s through the 90s, she comes across as fearful and defiant, like someone who knows what they did.
In 1939, Reifenstahl was once again asked by the Nazis to produce another documentary, this time an impromptu one focusing on their invasion of Poland. On this matter, “Riefentstahl” gives a nauseating account of why Riefentstahl abandoned the project because she wouldn’t have been able to turn it into the kind of presentation that is detached from the harsh truth of reality. Instead, she opted to produce a documentary called “Lowlands”, which was a saccharine opera that required the use of dozens of Roma (gypsy) people as extras. This required pulling many children out of a nearby internment camp. This is problematic since Riefenstahl had previously claimed that she knew nothing of such camps. What’s also quite chilling is that before abandoning the Polish documentary, she had demanded that a group of Jews be removed from the background of one scene. This led to these Jews being taken away and shot.
While “Reifenstahl” definitely builds a compelling case that Reifenstahl was indeed a Nazi, the documentary also provides some interesting background information on her that may give some context as to why she would often deny or evade such claims. There’s mention that she started as a dancer and actor in pre-war movies by Arnold Fanck and GW Pabst, and there’s an indication that she may have been a victim of sexual abuse at one point. She also stated that she had always been focused on the art without any political involvement or leanings.
One wonders if her past could have produced a proclivity for changing stances or flat-out lying. Veiel and Maischberger provide us with evidence that strongly indicates that she has been a Nazi sympathizer (at least) all along. They’ve produced phone calls from the ’60s and ’70s with her friend, the Nazi architect Albert Speer, in which we hear her longing for the “old days”; we also see her notes of organized hate mail that she had divided into different categories based on the people who sent them, with one category bluntly listed as “Jews”. Other notes are accounts of key moments from her work for the Third Reich that differ from the details she provided in her memoir, as if she’s trying to get her story straight. There are also letters in which she talks about her values having been “murdered” with Germany’s loss in the war. It’s telling that many of the letters and recorded voicemails she kept were in praise of her views. It’s human nature to embrace positive fan mail, but maybe her collection of all this helped support her own ideology despite others passing judgment on her.
When all this information is considered, it’s easy to see that Riefenstahl was not just an artist who happened to be commissioned by the Nazis, especially when history shows that she really didn’t make any films after World War II. Veiel doesn’t outright spell any of this out for us, but there’s enough to go on to formulate our own conclusions.
Reifenstahl often unintentionally indicts herself during these talk show appearances, most of which find her forcefully defending herself. During one 1976 appearance on the talk show “Je später der Abend,” she defended her desire to only focus on “beauty” and beautiful people in her films, emphatically answering “no” to the idea of ever being interested in filming disabled people. The conclusion is that she considered any human who isn’t considered “beautiful” and fully physically functional as an inferior being.
That being said, Riefenstahl’s stance on body image and her perception of beauty have had a lasting impact on marketing and advertising over the years. What visualizations of human figures have had the most influence over the years? The lean and fit, muscle-toned bodies are the images people have gravitated toward and envisioned for themselves for decades. The human body images that Riefenstahl included (and celebrated) in her films, especially in “Olympia”, continue to support this and remain visible today. As stylized and symbolic as her images were, there’s no denying that deliberate decisions were made throughout her work.
Indeed, separating the art from the artist is a challenge with Riefenstahl, especially considering what we learn about her in “Riefenstahl.” Her art wasn’t just an expression of who she is, but also who she was willing to conform to, and in turn, who she was okay with glorifying. Throughout the documentary, she maintains that she was solely focused on the art and that it exists on its own, without any inherent meaning. Considering the nature and subject of her work, that’s a hard sell; the message behind them is the only reason those films exist.
It’s ironic that “Reifenstahl” made its debut at last year’s Venice Film Festival, considering she had been honored several times at that particular festival. She was awarded the Silver Medal for “The Blue Light”, the Gold Medal for “Triumph of the Will”, and, in 1938, the Gold Medal of the Coppa Mussolini for Best Foreign Film for “Olympia”. Maybe it was a purposeful move, in an effort to counterbalance all the praise Reifenstahl received from the festival.
“Riefenstahl” remains a striking albeit unsettling portrait of an artist, offering new insight into who she was, rather than just what she did.
RATING: ***
