FRED's Interview: Sandra Maischberger - RIEFENSTAHL #venezia81

friend from Radio this is Manuela Santa Katarina from the at1 Venice Film Festival I'm in company of Sandra M Becker the producer of riffell out of competition here in Venice nice to meet you and welcome I'm very glad to be here thank you for having me I would like to start uh from a simple question why this documentary why today well first we had an estate uh Lenny reny died already many years ago but her husband died in 2017 and there was this house full of documents films tapes whatever she left behind and I knew that I I could get hold on this estate and so there were 700 boxes with new evidence and that was the first impulse to do this film because um you know I met Lenny reeny many years ago doing an interview and I could feel that she was lying but now looking at the estate I can prove it and why hres Fel was the right man for uh this documentary because he's a documentarist he's a great director and he has to deal with a lot of material how did you choose him well there's two main reasons first he did boys which is a brilliant documentary about uh use of boys and artists and already there he had to cope with a lot of material with a lot of you know um things which are not moving papers and evidence and so on and he did it brilliantly and I thought he's the best choice for this film and then secondly you're dealing with Len RAR she is a master um Master director she created images which are still prevailing today so you cannot just put someone to make a simple documentary uh telling the story it must be an artwork by itself and this is what andras and his team especially Stefan kigel did on this film um from the United States uh to Europe fire right movement has found ground um and um there are a lot of um new fascism all over the world do you think this is also because it's full of uh ly Ral out in the world that was one of the questions we uh we had to answer because um her artwork her aesthetic is still here you can see it you can see it if you see at the Olympic Games the way it's photographed it is uh more or less reent Style Style still you can see it on the parade of the 9th of May in Moscow so her athetics is still here and the question we had to answer is if the aesthetic is here maybe um as well the ideas behind it so are we facing a time where fascism nationalism um imperialism is coming back and this is my feeling about the time we're living it um I think that we are in a crucial moment of History his and I don't want to go back to where we already have been looking at L reeny and what the Nazis did so it's a film about an historical person but on the same time it's a film about what is going on what could be come in future for us in Europe especially um I think it's such a crucial element in this documentary because of the material this great a lot of material that he use and I would like to know if you use it also uh as some sort of weapon to expose her lives weapon to expose her yeah you know we knew that she would have been going through her estate and she would destroy many things which could put her into jail that was clear after 1945 after the world war ended she destroyed a lot of documents and so the question was is there still evidence is there something we could use as a weapon and yes uh surprisingly she left things behind she left things in the estate which um are um um are not the story she told in public so yes if you want to put it this way it is a little bit of a weapon what was the most dangerous um in in the most Insidious danger of the project for you um for me as a producer or as a political anim as a producer but also as a political well the f as a producer I started this project in 2017 we are now in the year 2024 so uh it's a lot of time and we have been doing a lot of research in archives not only in the estate of renad but in archives all over the world so it was a very costy project we had to put a lot of Manpower a lot of time and I I have been impatient a little bit with Andres in his team um from time to time because they were still going on editing editing editing and there was still everything coming new evidence so it was a very um from the financial point of view it was not so easy to do it because it was it would never end from the political point of view um we are now in a as I said in a historical moment where the ideals of the Nazis are coming back and I don't want people to look at this film and say oh they weren't that bad after all so they might there might be a danger there I want this film to be a warning where to stop and not to be seduced and not the other way around thank you so much Sandra MB producer of of Mana Santa Katarina from the 81 V film festival for Fred the festival Insider