Monika Ertl — A question of resistance

Monika Ertl, daughter of Riefenstahl cameraman Hans Ertl, left her privileged marriage in Bolivia at the end of the 1960s, joined the guerrilla set up in the country by Che Guevara in 1969 and radicalizes herself from an activist to an alleged political assassin. Her fight against the Bolivian dictatorship also leads to a confrontation with the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, who was smuggled in by the US secret service CIC and works for the military regime. In turn, French Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld and Régis Debray are on the trail of him. For Monika Ertl, the spiral of state power and counterpower is ending fatally. In “A Question of Resistance,” four actors from Germany, France and Bolivia create a piece about the life and motifs of Monika Ertl using a variety of film sequences, interviews with contemporary witnesses, archive material, theatrical scenes and musical designs. In the area of tension between resistance, violence and revolution, they ask: How can we talk about this cinematic, revolutionary life? When and why does a civilian take up arms? Who legitimizes counterviolence? And what would we do ourselves if our democracy turned into a dictatorship and started making people disappear? The production is the third and final part of Felix Meyer-Christian's ten-year documentary theatre trilogy (2016 to 2026) about the extraordinary and often unknown life of Monika Ertl. To do so, he filmed with COSTA COMPAGNIE on two continents in La Paz and Paris, Santa Cruz and Lyon, the Alps and the Andes and interviewed former fighters, eyewitnesses and historians. The long-term research results in 2027 in an independent documentary directed by Meyer-Christian, in co-production with ZDF and in collaboration with ARTE.

Since 2012, COSTA COMPAGNIE from Berlin has been designing documentary works that combine performative, cinematic and choreographic methods and are implemented in productions, immersive 360° performances, virtual & augmented reality and film. It focuses on global political upheavals, regions of war and conflict, and the question of the people in them, who often remain underrepresented in art, media and politics. To this end, the group researches and films in eastern Ukraine, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, the USA, Thailand, Japan, Mozambique and South Sudan, among others. Works have been presented at Impulse Festival, the Politics in the Free Theatre Festival, the Achtung-Berlin Film Festival and the Max Ophüls Prize Film Festival, among others.