Monika Ertl, daughter of Leni Riefenstahl’s cameraman Hans Ertl, leaves her privileged marriage in Bolivia in the late 1960s and, in 1969, joins the guerrilla movement that Che Guevara had built in the country — radicalizing from an activist into a suspected political assassin. Her fight against the Bolivian dictatorship also leads to a confrontation with the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, who was smuggled into the country by the US intelligence agency CIC and works for the military regime. He, in turn, is being tracked by the French Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld and Régis Debray. For Monika Ertl, the spiral of state violence and counter-violence ends fatally.
In »Eine Frage des Widerstands« (A Question of Resistance), four actors from Germany, France, and Bolivia weave together film sequences, interviews with eyewitnesses, archival material, theatrical scenes, and musical compositions into a piece about the life and motives of Monika Ertl. Caught in the tension between resistance, violence, and revolution, they ask: How do you tell a life story this cinematic, this revolutionary? At what point — and why — does a civilian take up arms? Who legitimizes counter-violence? And how would we ourselves act if our democracy were to turn into a dictatorship and begin to disappear people?
The production is the third and final part of Felix Meyer-Christian’s ten-year documentary theatre trilogy (2016–2026) on the extraordinary and often little-known life of Monika Ertl. Tracing her story across two continents, Meyer-Christian and COSTA COMPAGNIE filmed in La Paz and Paris, Santa Cruz and Lyon, the Alps and the Andes — interviewing former fighters, eyewitnesses, and historians along the way. This long-term research will culminate in 2027 in a stand-alone documentary film directed by Meyer-Christian, co-produced with ZDF and produced in collaboration with ARTE.

Based in Berlin, COSTA COMPAGNIE has been creating documentary works since 2012, combining performative, cinematic and choreographic approaches. Their work takes the form of stage productions, immersive 360° performances, Virtual and Augmented Reality experiences, and films. The company focuses on global political transformations, war and conflict regions, and the people living within them—whose perspectives often remain underrepresented in art, media and politics. As part of their research, the group has worked and filmed in, among other places, eastern Ukraine, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, the United States, Thailand, Japan, Mozambique and South Sudan. Their work has been presented at, among others, the Impulse Festival, Festival Politik im Freien Theater, Achtung Berlin Film Festival and Film Festival Max Ophüls Preis.