Luis Trenker

Luis Trenker was an Italian director, actor, mountaineer, bobsledder, and writer from the South Tyrol. A great lover of the mountains, he shot his films mainly outdoors. With a strong and sturdy physique, he was also an actor in almost all his films. Trenker also wrote several novels.

Trenker’s became famous when he acted for director Arnold Fanck in the 1926 film “The Holy Mountain”, where his co-star was Leni Riefenstahl. The Fascist regime in Italy and the National Socialists in Germany tried to exploit Trenker’s works, with little success, as he was able to get by without supporting blatant Nazi or Fascist propaganda, although his fierce enemy was Joseph Goebbels.

Trenker’s honors and awards included the 1936 Venice Film Festival Award (Coppa Mussolini) for best foreign film for “Der Kaiser von Kalifornien”, the 1966 Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, and in 1982 he received the Deutscher Filmpreis for outstanding individual contributions to German cinema.