Alina Marazzi • Director of The Girl with the Leica
"We wanted to restore visibility to a woman forgotten by history"
- VENICE 2026: The Italian director talks to us about her portrait of Gerda Taro, Robert Capa’s partner and colleague, and the first female photojournalist to die on the battlefield
The film that had the honour of opening the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival, The Girl with the Leica, is a portrait of Gerda Taro, partner and colleague of Robert Capa. She was the first photojournalist to die on the battlefield, during the Spanish Civil War. We spoke with the feature's director, Alina Marazzi.
Cineuropa: The film is loosely inspired by Helena Janeczek’s novel of the same name. Did the author collaborate with you?
Alina Marazzi: Yes, Helena and I worked on an initial adaptation of the book. We already knew each other, and when I read it, I immediately thought it could become a film. Then, the production company optioned the rights. As we moved forwards, we brought in screenwriter Valia Santella. Helena, however, did not wish to be directly involved in the screenplay, also because she was working on another book. There was, on her part, a great deal of trust in leaving us free rein to adapt her novel. In the book, Gerda is evoked through the memories of her three closest friends. We instead decided to adopt Gerda’s point of view. And we also added a voice-over to make the film more introspective.
Visually, you give a lot of space to images, with many references from that era.
The novel is also very detailed and full of precise historical references. Many elements in the movie, such as the insert from L’Atalante or the German film Kuhle Wampe or Who Owns the World?, are already present in the novel. The rest comes from the period context. We began archival research in the earliest stages of development and writing. This material was shared with the screenwriter, and later with the director of photography and the cast. By the time we had locked the cast, I had gathered all of this material, and it had become a kind of reference handbook for me.
Did the German co-production also play an important role in the casting?
When the German co-production was finalised, the idea was, in any case, to make an international film with a European cast. We chose to use mostly German actors and the German language for greater authenticity. I didn’t yet know Emilia Schüle, our lead, but all of the actors are part of an up-and-coming generation, very talented and with diverse experiences behind them.
The film is edited together from different materials: what you shot, in two formats, and archival footage.
We shot on film, on 16 mm. It was an aesthetic choice supported by the producers, with the idea of bringing our footage closer to the celluloid archive material, to black and white, and to photography. We also shot some sequences on Super 8: fairly spontaneous shots that we later decided to include in the edit. We furthermore chose the 4:3 format, instead of widescreen, precisely to bring the footage closer to the format of the archives and black-and-white images.
Gerda was a brilliant woman who was forgotten far too soon.
Gerda was long forgotten, despite being an integral part of Robert Capa’s story and of their work. It’s the story of a woman overshadowed by a man who would become an almost legendary figure. This often happens with artistic couples: there can be great collaboration and creative harmony, but the man ends up getting most of the credit. In their case, for a time, they even decided to use the same byline. At a certain point, though, Gerda perhaps felt that their romantic and professional bond was becoming limiting. A few months later, she died. Her photographs ended up in Capa’s archive and, when he died in 1954, no one asked any more who had taken those pictures. So there was certainly also the desire to restore visibility to a female figure erased by history.
There’s an evident contemporaneity to Gerda. How did the film underline that?
Exactly as she is described in the novel, Gerda comes across as a very contemporary figure: she has a strong sense of autonomy, great freedom and a powerful drive towards independence. That’s what made her feel like a modern woman to me. We tried to underscore that in the staging as well. It’s a period film set in the 1930s, but through the camera movements and shooting style, as well as the actors’ performances, we wanted to convey a certain spontaneity and a dimension closer to the present. We didn’t want to make a stiff, dusty, overly conventional historical film.
(Translated from Italian)
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