Biopic planned on Nazi film-maker Riefenstahl 04/11/2007 00:00

Berlin (dpa) - The life of Leni Riefenstahl, the woman who directed the most potent Nazi German propaganda films, will itself become a film under a project announced near Berlin.

German film studio Ufa Fernsehproduktion said it planned to partner with ZDF German public television and a British company to co-produce the biopic as a two-part TV special.

Triumph of the Will, her film dramatizing the Nazi Party rally of 1934, and Olympia, her film about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, made the Nazi aesthetics of mass loyalty and show of muscle seem glamourous.

Though praised as a landmark in film history, Triumph is rarely screened nowadays. At the museum of Naziism in Nuremberg, educationists only show it to groups after briefings about the flaws in its evil message.

Hitler's personal film maker, who died in 2003 at the age of 101, showed no remorse and claimed she had been non-political. She practised still photography of muscular Sudanese tribesmen and divers after the Second World War.

Chief executive Norbert Sauer said at Ufa's Potsdam studio near Berlin that Ufa was still in final talks with ZDF, but hoped to cast an actress in the part of Riefenstahl by the end of the year, with filming next year.

Ufa partnered with ZDF to make another TV movie, The Last Voyage of the Wilhelm Gustloff, depicting the sinking of a shipload of German refugees in the Baltic in 1945.

It is set to premiere as a TV special early next year. Neighbouring eastern European nations view with unease the depiction of Germans as sufferers during the Second World War, fearing it will lead to a "revision" of history.

DPA

Subject: German news