Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl, a new documentary on the infamous Nazi-era German director Leni Riefenstahl, has sold strongly internationally following its world premiere at the Venice and Telluride Film Festivals.
Beta Cinema, who are handling world sales on the film, locked down deals across Europe for the documentary, including with ARP for France, Filmin for Spain, Midas Filmes for Portugal, Edge Entertainment in Scandinavia, Against Gravity for Poland, Cirko Film for Hungary, Imagine in Benelux and MCF for the territories of the former Yugoslavia. Longride Entertainment will release the film in Japan. Additional territories are currently in negotiation.
In Germany, Riefenstahl will go out via Majestic, with Italian distribution handled by the film’s co-producer Rai Cinema.
Veiel and Riefenstahl producer, the acclaimed German journalist and political talk show host Sandra Maischberger, spent six years pouring over more than 700 boxes of film, writing, audio and other documents from Leni Reifenstahl‘s personal archive for the movie. It aims to debunk many of the “myths” that arose around Riefenstahl, the director of Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will and Olympia, following the war — including that she was a naive artist, was not close to Adolf Hitler and knew nothing about the Holocaust until after WW2.
Veiel is an award-winning documentarian and occasional feature film director who has spent a career examining controversial and divisive figures in German history. He shone a light on German left-wing terror group the RAF in 2001 documentary Black Box BRD and in the fictional feature If Not Us, Who? (2011), and probed the life and art of German avant-garde artist Joseph Beuys in the 2017 doc Beuys.
