Rent Riefenstahl (2024)

Riefenstahl: Architect of Her Own Alibi - Riefenstahl review by griggs

Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl strips away decades of self-mythologising to reveal a portrait that is as damning as it is detailed. Using archival footage, photographs, and her own recorded words, the film dismantles the idea of Riefenstahl as a bystander to history. Instead, she is shown as a calculating, opportunistic artist who actively courted power, lending her prodigious skill to the propaganda needs of the Nazi regime.

Veiel resists the temptation to frame her as merely a conflicted genius, highlighting instead how her later ethnographic work served as a form of self-absolution, carefully curated to obscure her complicity. The film makes clear that her aesthetic brilliance cannot be divorced from the ideology it helped to glorify.

There is no glamour here, only the uncomfortable truth of an artist who refused accountability, even in old age. It’s a meticulous and unflinching reminder that beauty in service of oppression is not neutral — and that denial, repeated often enough, becomes its own form of propaganda.