When the Nazi elite is remembered, two prominent women likely come to mind: Adolf Hitler’s partner Eva Braun and dancer-turned-actress-turned-director Leni Riefenstahl.

Today, Riefenstahl’s cinematic influence is frustratingly undeniable. It was her striking and unsettlingly staged documentaries that first brought the pageantry of Nazism onto the world stage in works like Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938), her film on the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin. Echoes of Riefenstahl’s aesthetic can today be seen in films as diverse as the finale to the original Star Wars to the work of legendary director (and passionate leftist) Orson Welles, who famously and reluctantly praised Riefenstahl’s cinematic talents on national television. Leni, who Andres Veiel calls “a prototype of fascism,” is now the subject of the German director’s new documentary Riefenstahl, now in theaters in New York and Los Angeles.

The Stuttgart-born Veiel has received many accolades, including winning the Venice Film Festival’s Cinema & Arts Award for the 115-minute, heavily researched Riefenstahl. The multitalented auteur’s filmography ranges from features to documentaries to the stage. His 2011 narrative movie If Not Us, Who? about Germany’s Baader–Meinhof Gang won two Berlin International Film Festival awards and was nominated for the Golden Berlin Bear.