Andres Veiel shows how the film-maker loved by Hitler hit the heights with her Berlin Olympics movie – and how she tried and failed to save her Nazi-tinged reputation

Leni Riefenstahl returns to the Venice film festival, after a fashion, as the star of Andres Veiel’s extraordinary deep-dive documentary about the original cancelled artist. It was here, at Mussolini-era Venice in 1938, that Riefenstahl scooped the top prize for Olympia, her sublime, suspect paean to the Berlin Olympics. Her career hit the heights on the Lido, after which it plunged straight to hell. Veiel’s film shows how it happened, and how she tried and failed to salvage her reputation.

Riefenstahl does not come to praise or reclaim the late director, but nor does it mean to bury her. It acknowledges her as a trailblazer: a driven female artist in a male-dominated industry whose poetic eye and technical nous turned the medium on its head.