Page "Leni Riefenstahl" Paragraph 34

Riefenstahl tried many times ( 15 by her count ) to make films during the 1950s and 1960s but was met with resistance, public protests and sharp criticism.

Many of her filmmaking peers in Hollywood had fled Nazi Germany and were unsympathetic to her.

Although both film professionals and investors were willing to support her work, most of the projects she attempted were stopped owing to ever-renewed and highly negative publicity about her past work for the Third Reich.

In 1956, inspired by Ernest Hemingway's 1935 novel Green Hills of Africa, she began an ambitious film project in Africa drawn from another novel called Schwarze Fracht ( Black Freight ).

While scouting shooting locations, she almost died from injuries received in a truck accident.

After waking up from a coma in a Nairobi hospital, she finished writing the script there, but was soon thoroughly thwarted by uncooperative locals, the Suez Canal crisis, and bad weather ( only test shots were ever made ).