Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl, about arguably the 20th Century’s most controversial filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, will open the 28th edition of DocsBarcelona on March 8. The screening coincides with the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.
“With previously unseen archive material, private films, letters and photos…Andres Veiel (If Not Us, Who?; Loving Highsmith) offers in Riefenstahl a new portrait of the director of Triumph of the Will and Olympia,” the festival writes. “It suggests her awareness of the atrocities of the Third Reich and captures her attempts to rewrite her own history. Produced by the renowned journalist Sandra Maischberger, the film was received in German cinemas by more than 120.000 spectators, after its world premiere at the Venice Biennale in 2024.”
DocsBarcelona’s artistic director and head of programming Maria Colomer comments how “Riefenstahl reflects on cinema and power through a director who controlled her own narrative and images that, over time, reveal more than they hide. In a time of political change, war, and growing instability, the documentary reminds us of the seductive power of images and narratives, while posing a crucial question: what is the artist’s responsibility? Through the archive, Riefenstahl shows us how history is constructed and rewritten, inviting us to rethink the past and its current perception.”
When Riefenstahl director Andres Veiel spoke to Business Doc Europe ahead of the film’s world premiere at Venice 2024, he highlighted her duplicity in masking her Nazi connections. “After 1952, she denied even being a witness,” he observed of events at which Riefenstahl was clearly present. “She was denying her presence. Of course she lied, but you have different layers of denial. At the beginning, she said she was a witness, until 1948, and then later on, that she was no witness…her role is quite ambivalent and it is shifting.”
Germany, guest country, and Heino Deckert, winner of the Docs Honorary Award
Furthermore, the 28th edition of DocsBarcelona will feature Germany as its guest country, highlighting its documentary legacy and impact on the non-fiction film industry. “The combination of a dynamic independent industry and the strong institutional support it has received has fostered an extraordinary diversity of perspectives and formal innovation that will also be reflected in the festival’s programming, with a selection of productions in competition, as well as professional activities aimed at fostering collaboration between German filmmakers and the international industry,” the festival writes.
The festival will also pay tribute to renowned German producer and distributor Heino Deckert, who will receive the 2025 Docs de Honor Award, with a masterclass at the Filmoteca de Catalunya and the screening of two of his most emblematic works: Rabbit à la Berlin, a surprising story about the rabbits that inhabited the security zone of the Berlin Wall, hence a metaphor for the division of Germany, and Heimat is a Space in Time, a poetic journey through German history that combines personal and collective memory.
