German artist Anselm Kiefer began his career in the late Sixties, and made a name for himself by producing controversial works that deliberately referenced Germany's Nazi past. In a culture which - in his view - was trying its best to either minimize or even forget its past, Kiefer tried his best to use art to encourage viewers to come to terms with it. Alan Yentob's documentary commends him for the sincerity of his task, yet refrains from making judgment on his work; we do not really know whether the consciousness-raising efforts of the artists had any profound effect on the ways in which German people viewed their worlds.

Instead the documentary chooses to focus on Kiefer's later work, which certainly does not want for ambition. He has shifted studios on numerous occasions; at present he has taken over a large space just outside Paris once used as a department store warehouse. He tends to be highly ambitious in his creations, regularly employing assistants to carry out his wishes. The theme of World War II keeps resurfacing in his work, as he builds installations using replica models of destroyed airplanes. There is not supposed to be any clearly defined "meaning" in what he does: as he says to interviewer Yentob, his responsibility as an artist is to find connections between apparently disparate images and objects, letting viewers understand and evaluate such connections for themselves.

Kiefer comes across in this documentary as a highly intelligent artist, with a multlingual talent for communication in German, English and French. Yet perhaps the program might have benefited from some judicial editorial pruning; there are too many longueurs in which the camera passes lovingly over Kiefer's work without giving viewers sufficient time to explore it in detail.