Venice Opens Orizzonti With 'The Girl With The Leica,' a Biopic of War Photographer Gerda Taro
A biopic of Gerda Taro, the photojournalist killed covering the Spanish Civil War at 26, opened the Orizzonti section of the 2026 Venice Film Festival. Directed by Alina Marazzi, The Girl With The Leica screened on the Lido in September, kicking off the festival's sidebar devoted to new trends in world cinema (Deadline).
Emilia Schüle plays Taro; Aaron Altaras plays Endre Friedmann, the photographer who became famous under a name Taro invented — Robert Capa. The film traces roughly five years of Taro's life, beginning in Leipzig in 1932, when she was still Gerta Pohorylle, a young woman from a Jewish family in the German city. It follows her into exile, into photography, into the relationship with Friedmann, and onto the battlefields of Spain (Deadline).
Taro is widely credited as the first woman photojournalist to die covering a conflict. The film's title nods to the Leica camera she carried — the lightweight 35mm that reshaped war photography in the 1930s. She also adopted a blue jumpsuit that became her signature, a detail the film takes up. Friedmann, a Hungarian émigré, took the name Robert Capa at her suggestion. The two worked side by side in Spain, and the film builds toward the day in 1937 when a tank collided with the car Taro was travelling in near Brunete, east of Madrid.
Orizzonti — Italian for "Horizons," Venice's competition strand for more adventurous cinema — chose Marazzi's film as its opening title, according to the festival's official programme (La Biennale programme PDF). The festival's own description evokes "the energy of ideals and resistance and the fierce courage of youth" (La Biennale). The film runs 118 minutes and is in German, with Italian and English subtitles. Venice's 83rd edition opened with Danny Boyle's Ink (Deadline).
Behind the camera, the film is an Italian-German co-production. Marta Donzelli and Gregorio Paonessa produced for Italy's Vivo Film with Rai Cinema, and Germany's Komplizen Film co-produced (Variety; Cineuropa). Fandango Sales, the Rome-based outfit run by producer-distributor Nanni Moretti's circle of collaborators, boarded international sales ahead of the festival (Variety) — meaning the company is handling rights sales to distributors in territories outside Italy and Germany.
The story of a woman who lived fast, invented a legend, and died on a road in Spain before she turned 27 is a natural fit for a festival that opens its second-most-prestigious strand each year to exactly that kind of subject. Whether the film travels beyond Venice into wider theatrical release will depend on the deals Fandango closes with buyers in the coming weeks.
