“La ragazza con la Leica”, interview with director Alina Marazzi and actress Emilia Schüle

The Girl with the Leica opens the Orizzonti section of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival 2026. Directed by Alina Marazzi, with lead actress Emilia Schüle, the film follows the photographer Gerda Taro: her life in Germany in the early 1930s, her exile in Paris, where she meets fellow exile Robert Capa, and her work documenting the consequences of war on the civilian population in Spain.

On FRED, Alina Marazzi and Emilia Schüle introduce The Girl with the Leica starting from a sentence Gerda Taro says at one point in the film: “My photos will prove that the real crime is doing nothing.”

Not getting numb, not looking away

Asked whether Gerda Taro’s photography still speaks to today’s world, Emilia Schüle ties the film directly to the present. “The film is definitely asking this question. It’s reminding us of the power of images and of the responsibility of those people who are shown in the picture and also the people who are witnessing what is shown in the picture. It’s asking us not to get numb, not to look away.” For Alina Marazzi, Gerda Taro’s example is above all about presence and participation. “What Gerda Taro can teach us still today is to be present to our time, and to take part in history. She wanted to give her contribution with her photographs. She wanted to show, for instance, the consequences of war on the civilian population in Spain.” Marazzi draws a direct line to the present: “What’s very important today is that people who are the same age Gerda was then are independent freelance journalists, video makers who very bravely go over to Gaza or Ukraine to document what’s happening there in order to let the world know.”

The Girl with the Leica, not The Boy

Asked how the film gently sets Robert Capa aside despite his part in the story, Marazzi and Schüle start with the title itself. “The film is called The Girl with the Leica. If we were called The Boy with the Leica, maybe we would be somewhere else.” At the time the story is set, when Gerda Taro and Robert Capa met, Capa was only twenty-one: “He was already a photographer full of energy and determination. He had a big drive. But at the time they were very young kids and they were finding out who they were while they were experiencing it. So he wasn’t already the famous war photographer to be known later in the years.” The film, they explain, keeps its focus on Gerda: not only her time in Spain, but where she comes from, Germany in the early ’30s, and her life as an exile in Paris, where she meets other exiles such as Robert Capa. “Capa is one of the main characters, but the protagonist is Gerda. It’s really about her authorship and becoming her own artist, using her own voice that started together with Robert Capa, but it’s about becoming Gerda Taro.”

Plot