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Using previously unpublished interviews, family footage and 1930s propaganda films, The Propagandist tracks the rise and fall of filmmaker Jan Teunissen, who became the most powerful man in the Dutch film industry during WWII under the Dutch Nazi Party.
Teunissen, nicknamed the ‘Film Tsar’ and the ‘Dutch Leni Riefenstahl’, was a wealthy and well-known filmmaker before the war. What drove him to become part of the Nazi regime?
A portrait gradually emerges of a man and his motivations, of unbridled ambition and the manipulative power of film. Luuk Bouwman’s film deep dives into this lesser-known history while remaining acutely relevant to today, laying bare the workings of propagandists – how they disseminate images, narratives, disinformation and ideology.