Espoo Ciné, in collaboration with Cinema Orion, presents an additional screening of Andres Veiel’s documentary Riefenstahl, which attracted great interest at the August edition of Espoo Ciné and had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The screening is part of Cinema Orion’s European Film Winter series. The film will be shown at Cinema Orion on Wednesday, January 7, 2026, at 5:15 PM. Tickets are available through Cinema Orion’s ticket sales.
Directed by the German filmmaker Andres Veiel, the documentary Riefenstahl is a profound and ambivalent portrait of one of the most controversial figures in film history—Leni Riefenstahl.
The documentary is based on Riefenstahl’s extensive personal archive, which includes thousands of letters, diaries, photographs, recordings, and private film fragments. Veiel goes beyond a purely chronological narrative, constructing a multilayered story in which Riefenstahl’s self-portrait is set against documented reality.
The film examines both Riefenstahl’s artistic talent and her collaboration with the Nazi propaganda machine. She famously claimed to have been unaware of the Holocaust and distanced herself from Hitler’s ideology after the war, but the documentary also provides grounds for very different conclusions.
Veiel’s approach is not moralizing but analytical—he leaves it to the viewer to draw their own conclusions.
(Timo Kuismin)