The German Film Festival has a reputation of coming up with thought-provoking movies that can set you on edge. This year is no exception, writes arts editor HELEN MUSA.

Documentaries can set you on edge better than anything else, with their fascinating assurance that what you’re looking at is based in reality, for surely, the camera does not lie.

Top of the list in provocation in this year’s German Film Festival is Riefenstahl, directed by Andres Veiel, which turns the spotlight on the notorious filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who enjoyed cozy relationships with Hitler and Goebbels. 

She rose to international fame and notoriety with her films, Triumph of the Will, showcasing Hitler at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally and Olympia, her two-part take on the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium.

Both are regarded as the absolute acme of propaganda filmmaking, but as the documentary shows, Riefenstahl was to claim that she was just an artist searching for pure beauty, not a believer in Nazi ideology. 

She more or less got off the hook by being declared a Nazi sympathiser rather than a collaborator. She spent four years in a French detention camp before emerging, finding a much younger boyfriend in her cameraman Horst Kettner and reinventing herself, by photographing the children of Sudan’s Nuba tribe.

Director Veiel obtained access to Riefenstahl’s personal archives, so was able to follow her career and the narrative she would craft after World War II, by using archival interviews stretching from the 1960s to her death in 2003, her own films, and material from more than 700 boxes of records to both confirm and contradict her claims.

Riefenstahl was, even as an elderly woman, a fearsomely aggressive opponent in any public debate about her past, and is shown defending her reputation, denying knowledge of the gas ovens, claiming that Goebbels made unwanted moves of her, but also admitting that when she first saw Hitler she was bowled over by his charisma.

The film won’t be an easy watch for anyone who believes in art for art’s sake, for Veiel presents a chilling reminder that total dedication to one’s art does not guarantee a secure moral compass.

Provocation, of course, need not be entirely grim and comedy abounds in the hilarious box office hit Two To One which, based on true events, follows a group of East Germans in 1990 as they pull off an entertaining heist of soon-to-be-worthless East German marks.

Fresh from the recent Berlin International Film Festival is Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay’s thriller, Hysteria, tagged by the critics as a “shrewdly scathing German whodunit”.

Taking a look at the power of images and social hysteria, the film features rising star Devrim Lingnau as a hapless second assistant director who tries to save a movie production that spins out of control when a copy of the Koran is burnt on set.

In Matthias Glasner’s epic Dying – that’s the name of a composition for orchestra and choir – German actor Lars Eidinger plays an orchestra conductor at the Berlin Philharmonic. What happens there is already drawing comparisons to Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár, who had a meltdown on the very same podium.

And if all this sounds demanding, fear not, the Goethe-Institut’s Kino for Kids sidebar offers crowd-pleasers, such as Winners, the story of 11-year-old footballer and Syrian refugee Mona, and Circusboy, a documentary that chronicles 11-year-old Santino’s experience growing up in a travelling circus family.

Much weirder, The Chaos Sisters and Penguin Paul, adapted from a popular book series, follows four chaotic sisters who work to save a dancing penguin from evil magicians.

And who can resist a dancing penguin on film?

The 2025 German Film Festival, Palace Electric Cinemas, April 30-May 28.