Riefenstahl

Andres Veiel's Riefenstahl premiered at Venice in 2024 and went on to wide festival circulation through 2025, including the European Film Awards' Best Documentary shortlist and a Lola (German Film Award) nomination in the same category. The film was co-produced by ZDF and Arte and built on a remarkable archival find: the personal estate of Leni Riefenstahl, opened to researchers after the death of her companion Horst Kettner in 2016 and acquired by the Berlin-based Sandra Maischberger production company, which retained Veiel (the documentarist behind Black Box BRD and Beuys) to shape it into a film.

The estate consists of approximately seven hundred boxes of correspondence, calendars, photographs, audio tapes, home video and film negatives spanning a century. Veiel's editing approach (by editor Stephan Krumbiegel) is to construct the film almost entirely from this material, with no on-camera interviews and no traditional narration. The result was widely treated as one of the most ethically careful documentary portraits of a Nazi-era figure since Claude Lanzmann's late work, drawing comparisons in Sight & Sound, Cahiers du Cinéma and The Guardian.

The film also won the Petra Kelly - Act Now! Award at the German Film Awards, an additional prize given for documentary work of public-interest significance. It is one of the most-circulated German non-fiction films of the past decade and is being used as study material in several university programmes on documentary ethics and historical archives.