Vanessa Lapa

Vanessa Lapa is an Israeli documentary filmmaker known for two films that deal with Nazi war criminals Heinrich Himmler and his colleague Albert Speer. In addition, she has produced more than a hundred reports and documentaries for the television channels in Israel.

Early life
Lapa was born on May 29, 1975, in Antwerp, Belgium, in a very ideological "Betar" Zionist home and immigrated to Israel alone at the age of 19. She studied Middle Eastern and Arabic studies at Tel Aviv University, and then film studies at Camera Obscura school in Tel-Aviv. After her academic studies she started to work at Channel 1 as a researcher for Current affairs programs like "Popolitica" and "Erev Hadash". After "Founding the channel 10 in 2002, she joined it, and served as a researcher for the "Ben and Rosen" program and later as a reporter and researcher in the field of foreign news. She worked for the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in producing and direction a 52-minute documentary film about the Israeli West Bank barrier, a film that gained worldwide circulation through the New York Times

Freelance directing and producing
In 2006 Lapa set up an independent production company called RealWorks Ltd.. Her first film was "Olmert - Concealed Documentary" from 2008 which dealt with the private and public life of then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. It was supposed to be broadcast on Channel 2 by the Keshet franchisee, but was shelved following the Talansky affair that arose at the time and ahead of the broadcast date in June 2008

"Keshet" executives demanded that Lapa interview Olmert about the affair, in order to update the article, thus achieving a journalistic achievement. The interview did not yield the expected, partly because there was a restraining order by the court on the affair, and Lapa refused to turn the documentary into a news venture, insisting on her creative freedom, even though "Keshet" was supposed to pay $70,000 for the film. According to journalist and media lecturer Aviva Lori, the argument between Lapa and "Keshet" was over the limits of documentary responsibility. Eventually, the film aired several months later.

The Decent One
In 2006, the diaries of Heinrich Himmler and his family reached her. The first to collect these diaries, along with 350 letters from Himmler to his wife, and between 10 and 15 diaries of various kinds, and another 135 stills and various documents, were U.S. Army soldiers who captured Himmler's home on May 6, 1945. For some reason they were not handed over to the military authorities. All this material "laied" for decades in the house of an Israeli citizen, Haim Rosenthal (there is a version that the documents were in a bank safe ), and in 2006 Lapa's father bought it from Rosenthal's son and together With Prof. Nati Laor of Tel Aviv University, they persuaded Lapa to engage with the material. She has been working on these diaries for 7 years, searching archives around the world for authentic videos in which he appears, using techniques and technologies designed to clean the dirt that clinged to the footage, and restore their seemingly original soundtrack, to create the movie "The Decent One". When German TV stations refused to co-finance the project, Austrian investor Martin Schlaff stepped in.

The film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival 2014 and has participated in dozens of festivals around the world, and won the best docu-award of the Jerusalem Film Festival (2014) and was among the five finalists for the Israeli Academy of Film Award (Ophir Award). The film was on the list of 134 documentaries released in October 2014 from which the nominees for the Academy Award for Best Documentary were selected.

Speer Goes to Hollywood
The next film Lapa directed and produced and belongs to the same cinematic genre is "Speer Goes to Hollywood". Albert Speer was the Nazi Armament Minister that escaped the Nuremberg trials and was sentenced only to 20 years imprisonment. The film goes against the book he wrote and published in 1969 and against his claim that he was ostensibly unaware of the extermination of the Jews, even though he was a close friend of Hitler, and responsible for the armament of the Wehrmacht and the other armed forces of Nazi Germany. The film is based on the recording of many conversations with him in the United States. These conversations reveal his true and antisemitic character who stands in stark contrast to the "innocent" character he tried to present in the Nuremberg trials and in his book. These recordings have been hidden for years and were bought by Stanley Cohen, who acquired the rights to produce a film based on Speer's book, and holds with him together with screenwriter Andrew Birkin about 40 hours of recorded conversations over months. The film reveals all this, after Lapa, together with Tomer Eliav, the sound designer of "The Decent one", once again conducted extensive research on the man and the materials available about him. The film had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival 2020 and won "the best documentary film director" at the Jerusalem Film Festival in Autumn, 2021 as part of the Diamond Competition for Israeli Documentary Film. The film won the Ophir Award for the best Long documentary film for the year 2021.