Neil Friedman's LA-based Menemsha Entertainment has acquired international rights to the critically acclaimed documentary Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary and will introduce the film to buyers at Cannes. Sony Pictures Classics had earlier acquired rights in the English-speaking world and Mexico to the film, which debuted in Panorama at the Berlin Film Festival.

Produced by Austria's Dor Film, Blind Spot is an on-camera interview with 81 year-old Traudl Junge ' the first she has ever given. Junge (pictured above in the film), who died two days after the Berlin screening this year, was Adolf Hitler's private secretary from 1942 to the collapse of the Nazi regime in 1945. She worked with him in his field headquarters in East Prussia, at his Bavarian residence at Berchtesgaden, on his special train and, finally, in his bunker in Berlin where he dictated his last will and testament to her and where he committed suicide.

The interviews took place in spring 2001 and were conducted by Andre Heller, who directed the film with documentary film-maker Othmar Schmiderer. The two of them condensed ten hours of material into a 90-minute film which forgoes archival footage or still photography in favour of the talking head of Junge for its entirety.

Blind Spot won the Panorama Audience Award in Berlin where it screened just 50 metres from the bunker where Hitler died. Menemsha's European senior vice president Beatrix Wesle saw the movie and immediately started pursuing a deal which she recently closed with Danny Krausz from Dor.

The film has received considerable publicity in Germany where it opens nationwide on May 2 through Berlin-based Piffl Medien. "It's exactly the type of film we're looking for," said Friedman, who said that he is pursuing theatrical deals on the film. "It doesn't matter what language the film is in so long as it moves us."