Leonie, Actress and Spy directed by Annette Apon will be shown at It’s All True IDFF in International Competition for Feature and Medium-length in Disponível em todo território nacional, Plataforma Looke, 04/18/2021 at 3pm.
Leonie Brandt (1901-1978) dreamed of becoming an actress. After realising her dream she took on the role of her life: she became a spy for the Dutch intelligence service in Nazi Germany. After the war a number of prominent Dutchmen also feared Leonie for what she knew about their actions during the occupation. The film more or less follows the chronology of her astonishing life via scenes from old movies. Shrouded in a haze of mystery the ‘real’ or ‘fictional’ of her life is not always clear.
It’s All True International Documentary Film Festival
If It’s All True 2020 seemed to be the Covid-19 festival, the 26th edition is the second of what we might call the Pandemic era. The worst health tragedy in Brazilian history, the coronavirus death toll has already surpassed that of the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918, and there isn’t any end in sight. With each life lost, every family plunged into mourning, we can only reaffirm that the grief belongs to each and all. W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues” has become something of a collective daily prayer, even if only symbolically, as in isolation we can but shuffle along in a virtual cortege while we pray for the clocks to stop.
Faced with this forced reinvention of our routines, with the communal pleasure of the cinema theater largely off the table, festivals have had to get rid of their convivial essence, but remained true to their social and cultural mission by re-engineering themselves in their own ways. Many festivals, including It’s All True, have turned to streaming in a bid to honor their commitment to showcasing the cream of the year’s cinematic crop, foster debate, and offer the public a privileged window—albeit of another sort—onto the world.