Merkel: NZIFF Review

Depressingly book-ended by Donald Trump's hatred, doco Merkel is a fascinating and human approach to a character many will have seen on the world stage but in truth, know little about.

Director Eva Weber pulls together a portrait of the woman who rose from behind the communist wall of East Germany to triumph as she led a reunited Germany to success. Using footage from her past, as well as interviews from the likes of Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton and Condoleeza Rice, what emerges from Merkel is a formulaic but friendly look at her failings and her success.

From Blair's quote of absence of ego to her own dismissal of a party portrait overdone in make up, Merkel is a fairly sympathetic approach to the woman, and does revel more in the positive rather than the negative. Her seeming toppling of Helmut Kohl is largely brushed over, and a refugee crisis that rocked Germany is presented more in the light of her fear of separatism having grown up in East Germany than a look at the wider issues. Equally, a relationship with Vladimir Putin and Russia's energy deal is seen more as the former intimidating her than the politics that occasionally divided.

Occasionally a commentary on women in politics that could be widened to powerful women in a modern world, Weber's film only ever lightly raises issues rather than intensely tackling them. That may be no bad thing, but it does give a feeling there are less current critics of her regime given time to speak, even if archive footage provides some of the harder lines.

But as Merkel's humour comes to the fore, and Weber's tight hand on proceedings keeps it all in check, this 90 minute outing into the enigma feels like it's a solid outing into one of the world politics' old guard, whose desire to be on the right side of history, is entertaining enough fare. And as with most docos, it may provoke many to go and seek out further information on its subject.