Albert Ostermaier

Willy Zielke is a young, aspiring director and pioneering photographer in the 1920s. After his first film "Stahltier - The Steel Animal", he is recruited and used by Leni Riefenstahl and the Nazi regime for their Olympic films. Riefenstahl makes his art her own. When he becomes too dangerous to her career, she has him locked away in a psychiatric ward, where he is diagnosed as schizophrenic and forcibly sterilized. Five years later, she takes him back from the asylum because she needs him for her film "Tiefland". Later she will testify not to have been involved in Zielke's incarceration, and even more: not to have known about the later murder of the people she took out of the camps as extras for her film.
Willy Zielke wants to cut Leni Riefenstahl out of himself. She is the woman who has consumed him, who has sucked him dry and made his art her own. In an exorcism ritual, he once again conjures up the images that show how Riefenstahl, together with Goebbels, forged her perfidious plan.
In the screening room at the Reich Propaganda Ministry, Leni Riefenstahl and Josef Goebbels watch "The Steel Animal," Zielke's dark, expressionist-avant-garde masterpiece that Goebbels actually banned. As the film plays, the real scene unfolds between the two, evil in close-up, a close look at the mechanisms of power.
In sometimes nightmarish sequences, Schnitt takes us from Goebbels' home theater to the film set and into the bloody operating room, making us witness Zielke's inner recapitulation of the cruel story surrounding the destruction of his body and his work.