‘Riefenstahl’ Review: A Filmmaker in the Shadow of the Reich

The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl was not only the title of a 1993 documentary about her, but it could easily serve to describe her as a person and as an artist. The remarkable filmmaker became renowned for her aesthetically stunning works of the 1930s—documentaries burdened by the crucial fact that they were commissioned by Adolf Hitler and glorified the Third Reich. Riefenstahl remained entangled in that ethical and aesthetic conflict until her death in 2003, at the age of 101. The new documentary, simply titled Riefenstahl, once again presses on that incurable, unhealed wound.

German director Andres Veiel assembles archival material spanning the filmmaker’s entire life—photos and footage from her youth, her beginnings as an actress and director, and her entry into the Nazi “ecosystem” in the early 1930s. Once connected to Hitler, Josef Goebbels, Albert Speer, and others, she began producing films for the regime, including Triumph of the Will and Olympia, her monumental work on the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Perhaps more revealing are the interviews and footage from later decades, when Riefenstahl appeared on television to defend her supposed ignorance of Nazi horrors and to explain her work and politics in that context. Veiel not only includes these interviews but also the moments caught before filming or after a cut, where Riefenstahl appears angry and exasperated at the endless questioning. Her stance is consistent: she “pleads ignorance,” insisting she did nothing wrong, knew nothing, and was solely focused on her art.

Over nearly two hours, Veiel shapes this material to highlight her contradictions, her evasions, and, at the same time, the roots of her perpetual anger and defensiveness. Riefenstahl does not come across as sympathetic, but her constant sense of being under siege is palpable. Time and again, television journalists try to break through her armor, but never completely succeed. She is always clear on the version of herself she wants to present. Strikingly, audiences sometimes sided with her—particularly in an era when Nazi crimes were still, to some extent, minimized or denied in Germany.

Riefenstahl presents powerful scenes and images from her documentaries alongside home movies, underscoring her extraordinary eye for physical beauty, her talent for capturing monumental displays, and her pioneering control of cinematic spectacle—achieved without the technological resources available today.

The contradiction at the heart of any portrait of Riefenstahl lies not only in separating the artist from her art—and her patrons—, but also in the paradox of recognizing her as a powerful female figure who carved a place for herself, often through harsh struggles, in a male-dominated industry where women rarely held such authority.

Yet Veiel makes his central point clear: Riefenstahl’s role as a propagandist for the regime and her lifelong denial of its atrocities—she always claimed ignorance of the Holocaust, and the film seeks to show she was lying—overshadow and perhaps even erase her artistic achievements. The film leaves it to the viewer to decide, but it opens the door to a deeper understanding of a complicated figure, a filmmaker whose “wonderful and horrible” life became an enduring dilemma, outlasting even her films.