'The Girl With The Leica' Opens Venice, Reclaims Gerda Taro — SkimNews
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- Alina Marazzi directed 'The Girl With The Leica,' which premiered as the opening film of the Venice Horizons section and mixes color dramatic sequences with black-and-white archival footage, Super 8 and Super 16mm formats
- Gerda Taro (née Gerta Pohorylle), a German-born Jewish photojournalist, is reframed as a co-creator of works long attributed to Robert Capa (born Endre Erno Friedmann), with Taro and Friedmann initially adopting Anglicized aliases as a commercial strategy
- The narrative uses July 14, 1937 as a temporal anchor, moving backward and forward through Taro's memories of fleeing Nazi Germany, her Paris circle, and her return to the Spanish Civil War frontlines
- Taro served as Spanish Civil War correspondent for the Paris Communist newspaper Ce Soir and died on July 26, 1937 at Brunete, less than a week before her 27th birthday
- Emilia Schüle stars as Taro, depicting her as a dedicated anti-fascist photojournalist who refused Capa's marriage proposal and moved freely between relationships, including Canadian reporter Ted Allan
- The film lands ahead of the forthcoming English-language drama-romance 'Becoming Capa,' directed by Charlotte Colbert and starring Mark Eydelshteyn and Esther McGregor
- The review notes Taro wasn't merely erased by the Capa myth but initially allowed her work to run under his name before claiming her own photo credits
Why it matters: For cinephiles tracking photojournalism on screen, Marazzi's film establishes its version of the Taro-Capa story first, arriving ahead of Charlotte Colbert's English-language 'Becoming Capa' and potentially shaping how that Hollywood project frames its subject. The source highlights a nuance often lost in reclamation narratives: Taro was an active co-architect of the Capa brand who later reclaimed her own byline.
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