When I covered the New Orleans Film Festival in 2023, I discovered that creative non-fiction is a documentary genre of its own: films made in unconventional ways, rather than the traditional all-archival approach. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. I’ve always been drawn to documentaries that tell their subjects stories through creative storytelling, and “The Girl with the Leica” is exactly that kind of film, directed by the award-winning documentarian, Italian director Alina Marazzi.
“The Girl with the Leica,” follows Gerda Taro (born Gerta Pohorylle), the German-Jewish photojournalist who fled Nazi persecution for Paris in 1935. There she met André Friedmann, soon to be known as Robert Capa, and with him built a career photographing the Spanish Civil War. Taro was killed at the front in July 1937, at about 26, and is often described as the first woman photojournalist to die on the front lines of battled. For decades her work was credited to Capa, and her reputation faded.
Marazzi doesn’t tell this story the way a conventional biopic or documentary would. Loosley adapted from Helena Janeczek’s novel of the same name, in this film past and present collide, and Marazzi cuts between dramatized scenes, archival footage, and Taro’s own photographs. The result lives in the space creative non-fiction occupies: it is faithful to a life without being bound to the formula of recounting it.
That approach comes naturally to Marazzi, whose career is built on found footage and home movies. Her best-known work is a trilogy on female subjectivity, motherhood, and memory: “For One More Hour With You” (2002), “We Want Roses Too” (2007), and “All About You” (2012). She is also a creative and artistic director of the Unarchive Found Footage Fest, held at the Cineteca di Roma.
What I love about this way of telling true stories is that it lets us feel history rather than just study it. Taro’s story could easily have become a distant, dutiful portrait. Instead, Marazzi makes her a restless, living young woman, played with remarkable energy by German actress Emilia Schüle, and invites us to see the 1930s through the eyes of a whole generation. As Marazzi explains below, that choice is deliberate. She sees in Taro’s circle of young people trying to understand where the world was heading an echo of Europe today, which makes the film feel less like a historical piece than a conversation with the present. That, to me, is what bending the rules of documentary can do.
In the conversation below, Marazzi discusses what drew her to Taro, how the film was cast and edited, and why this story feels urgent now. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and flow.
“The Girl with the Leica” screened at the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival, where Marazzi also served on the feature documentary competition jury.
© 2026 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa – fadege.it, @fadege.it
What inspired you to tell Gerda’s story?
She was an amazing young woman growing up in a very difficult time in Europe, the 1930s. Her story is that of a woman who understood she could contribute to the cause of what was happening around her, and she did it through photography. It was a craft she picked up in Paris, where she arrived in 1935 after fleeing the rise of Nazi Germany. She discovered she could use photography to do something not just for herself. That’s why she went to Spain: she wanted to document the civilians in an unwanted war.
What intrigued me about Gerda was both her personality and the context, because the film is also a portrait of a whole group of young people, a whole generation.
How did you hear about her?
She had been long forgotten, and I felt she was one of the many women in history who need to be rescued from oblivion. That’s part of what I try to do in my work as a filmmaker. I didn’t know her photos before 2009, when there was the first exhibition in Italy. Her photos are held in New York, at the International Center of Photography, in the Robert Capa collection. So I knew her work and a little of her story.
Then the book came out, The Girl with the Leica, and I read it. It really resonated with me, partly because of how it’s written: a kind of montage of narrative and document. I like to work on the edge, mixing different elements in a film, so the book really triggered me. I started working on a film loosely based on it. The book is a novel, but it’s also a biography. So there’s an exhibition, a book, and a film.
How did you find Emilia Schüle for Gerda? She was awesome, and just radiated life and passion.
Although I’m an Italian director and the production company is Italian, with a German co-production, the whole story focuses on a German woman and other German characters, as well as Hungarian and Polish ones. When I was writing the screenplay, I wasn’t thinking of an Italian cast, because I couldn’t think of anyone. I wanted the actors to be as close to reality as possible, so I was thinking of an international cast, perhaps a German or French actress.
When we started working with the German production company, they suggested I work with a casting director, and we began the casting process in Berlin, looking first for Gerda. I met many amazing young actresses, very strong people. Then we decided to go with Emilia Schüle, who is actually a photographer herself. She’s an actress, but she has her own Leica camera, which she brought to the first casting session.
Oh, that’s amazing.
She was so excited. When she heard about the casting call, she couldn’t believe it. She kept saying, “That’s me, that’s me.” She also had real knowledge and understanding of analog photography. And an interesting fact is that she’s German but has Ukrainian roots, so she connected strongly to the story and to the present situation: she lives in Germany, but part of her family is in Ukraine now. She could really relate to Gerda’s urgency about living life to the fullest, in a lively and, in a positive sense, even superficial way, but also trying to leave a mark.
Can you talk about piecing the film together, working with your editor, the photos, and the actors?
From the beginning I had in mind using archival footage and her photos. While writing the script with the screenwriter, I was doing the archival research and showing her the footage I was finding, to feed her vision. Some scenes in the script are written as archival footage, describing what we would see, so the montage and the material were already in the script.
I also shared this material with the cast during table readings and when we talked about the project. I explained that I wanted to intercut with this footage, which was also research material on the Spanish Civil War and on Germany. So the whole cast had this material in their minds, along with Gerda Taro’s photographs. It was a process that started before the editing.
When we got to the editing, I worked with Ilaria Fraioli, who has edited my previous films. We’ve done a lot of work in montage, including working only with archives, so we’ve grown together in this practice. We have a very close relationship, a kind of shorthand, sometimes even without talking.
So in a way it was easy, because we had done this before. But it was also more challenging, because this was more fiction, and we needed to find the right balance between the fictional part and the documentary archive. That was a shared process with the production team, who were very supportive. It’s challenging for a production company to go forward with a project like this, because the industry outside was quite wary. Is this fiction? Is this archive? What is it? Will the archive break the emotion of the fictional part?
It was seamless, for me. I thought it brought the film to life more.
We had many internal screenings, including with the producer, who is also a woman, so there were many women in this production. This is the result, and we’ll see.
What do you hope people see in your film and in Gerda’s story?
The reason it was important to make this film is, of course, Gerda herself: telling the story of a woman who was forgotten, many of whose photos were for a long time credited to her male counterpart, Robert Capa, for different reasons. I feel very strongly that as a woman filmmaker I have the responsibility and the desire to tell women’s stories, to fill that void and give that acknowledgment back.
The other thing is that when I read the novel, it resonated, unfortunately, with the present situation in Europe. It’s relevant to today to tell the story of a young woman and a young group of people who were taking action, trying to understand where the world was going and whether they could contribute to creating a better world. What’s happening now in Europe feels very similar, unfortunately, with this very strong right wing. Even right now, there are many people in the streets in major European cities. So for me it’s not just a historical piece, and not just about an interesting photographer. Maybe it can tell us something about ourselves today.
An aside: you’re one of the creative and artistic directors of the Unarchive Found Footage Fest. Has that helped your own filmmaking?
I’ve been working with archives for a long time. The film I made 25 years ago, which is quite well known in Italy, was made entirely with archives, and I continued along that path. That’s why I got involved in this festival, Unarchive. It’s only been going five years, and I joined the team working out of a Cineteca archive in Rome that I knew very well. So it was a natural development of an interest I already had. I had also curated small programs before, of archive-based pieces and live performances, so being involved in programming a festival dedicated to found-footage practice and archive-based films was already part of my history.
It’s great because I get to see a lot of work by other people, which is very inspiring. It’s like being on a jury, but for longer, because you discuss many things with the team, and those conversations are interesting. And while I was here, beyond my jury duties, I was watching other archive-based films, such as “Rehearsals for a Revolution” and “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” two feature-length documentaries.
