The Nazis are a political party that have been studied, filmed and written about more so than seemingly any other in existence, many will know what they did, when and why. Riefenstahl asks many questions, but one of them is if you helped them in any way, are you as guilty as the likes of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler? This documentary is an intimate and investigative portrait of Leni Riefenstahl, the famous actress/director who was behind the infamous film covering Hitler's Nuremberg Rally in 1934, Triumph Of The Will. Was the director behind it an avid National Socialist who wanted to spread the word of her chosen party? Or was she just an up and coming director that the Nazis saw potential in and manipulated into thinking that their propaganda was art?

Through countless amounts of unseen footage and archives, Riefenstahl paints a very vivid picture of a very complicated individual. The director uses several interviews with Riefenstahl years after the end of Nazism where she's accused time and again of collaboration with the Nazis, being friends with their highest ranking members (including Hitler himself) and being fully aware of the atrocities they intended to commit while doing nothing to stand in their way. Her defence? That's usually a very pained expression of “you weren't there.”

Several viewers will come out of this documentary convinced that Leni Riefenstahl is indeed an ardent Nazi, seeing facts like hiring extras from a concentration camp, writing letters to Hitler and being albeit indirectly responsible for the deaths of 22 Jewish workers. That is definitely something the director intends when he implies that Riefenstahl was essentially acquitted after her trial in Nuremberg amongst the worst of the Nazis' war criminals. However, others will see her work after the war and refusal to film the German army in action, her pain when she's accused of Nazism and her gruelling accounts of sexual assaults at the hands of both prominent Nazis and her romantic interests alike and see the story of an artist who was bullied and manipulated who made the best of a bad situation. This is what true investigative filmmaking looks like, it presents all the evidence, but doesn't outright give you a conclusion, simply leading the audience to make a decision for themselves.

Riefenstahl is also a superbly made documentary, beautifully edited and directed. Like a lot of true crime documentaries and unlike a lot of historical ones, the film is rarely narrated, leaving Leni Riefensthal's words to speak for themselves. Only when context is utterly vital is the narrator introduced, to make the film run more smoothly. Though it is a shock when the narrator is first introduced as it comes quite late into the film. The documentary isn't perfect, it's pacing is skewed, sometimes feeling slow as the film, in an effort to paint a full portrait of its subject, travels down some roads that aren't quite as interesting and ends up feeling like padding for the run time. Similarly, the film ends quite abruptly and doesn't feel like it has a complete epilogue or conclusion.

Riefenstahl is a compellingly thorough and somewhat subjective investigation into one of the more complicated individuals to come out of one of history's darkest eras. It sometimes takes on too much but this is made up for in its sleek and fascinating nature, it's an educational and transfixing portrait that will give you more questions to ask than answers to said questions but that is very much to its benefit.

Riefenstahl is released in UK and Irish cinemas 9th May 2025