THE PROPAGANDIST

He was something like the Dutch equivalent of Leni Riefenstahl: in the early 1940s, Dutch film director Jan Teunissen became a loyal film industry official and enthusiastic producer of propaganda films for the Nazi occupiers. The main source for this gripping and excellently researched documentary film about him are shockingly honest interviews that historian Rolf Schuursma conducted with Teunissen in the 1960s. What becomes clear is that the “propagandist” was less of an ideologue than an opportunistic careerist.