For the purposes of filming Tiefland, in 1941, Leni Riefenstahl, the “director of Hitler”, recruited Gypsies in a transit camp before their deportation to the death camps. In 2001, Martha, a marine biologist and daughter of an extra in the film, accompanies the filmmaker on her last diving trip to the Maldives with the intention of putting her on trial. “Your images alone interest you, the rest doesn’t count and is completely indifferent to you. That’s why you’re a Nazi, Leni, in a hundred years of existence you haven’t once wondered about the difference between a living child and a dead child…” Cleverly combining real-life facts and fiction, interspersing quotations and various acts and gestures of the director of Gods of the Stadiumthe fruit of meticulous research, the Italian novelist Emilano Poddi sketches the portrait of a woman steeped in contradictions, esthete, narcissistic, seductive and elusive, both a brilliant filmmaker and a filthy human being.
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