In 2002, Sandra Maischberger met the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl for an interview. Now she has searched through hundreds of boxes from the director’s estate for a documentary about her.
The presenter and TV producer Sandra Maischberger considers Leni Riefenstahl to be “a thoroughly convinced fascist and National Socialist”. The 57-year-old said this in an interview with the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit”. Maischberger has produced a documentary film about Riefenstahl (1902-2003), which will premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
The director Riefenstahl became known through Nazi propaganda films such as “Triumph of the Will”, but always presented herself as apolitical. The documentary “Riefenstahl”, which premieres in Venice on August 29, was directed by the Stuttgart-born director Andres Veiel.
700 boxes from the estate evaluated
For the film, Maischberger evaluated Riefenstahl’s estate, which was packed in 700 boxes. The boxes contained many items, such as audio cassettes with which Riefenstahl had recorded phone calls and messages on the answering machine, as well as conversations with old and new Nazis, from which it became clear “that an opportunist was not at work here.”
Maischberger interviewed Riefenstahl in 2002 on the occasion of her 100th birthday. “At times I thought she was lying,” says the presenter. “I couldn’t get a single thing out of her. And I thought that couldn’t have been it.” This is how the idea for a documentary film was born.
Maischberger: Film fits in with post-fascist trends
Maischberger says she thinks it is fitting that the film is now being shown at the Venice Festival, where Leni Riefenstahl won two film awards at the end of the 1930s, including for her Olympic documentary. “Our premiere is taking place in a country whose head of government allows the fascist salute to be shown en masse on the street. In this European present, in which we are experiencing the rise of right-wing populist, post-fascist, neo-Nazi movements, Venice is exactly the right forum.”
Maischberger says she wanted to make the film not only for specialists, but also “for the generation of my son, who is seventeen and who had never heard the name Leni Riefenstahl.”
Source: Stern
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