It is based on five women who did survive the Holocaust but shared her same fate of "deportation, suffering and being denied their childhood and adolescence," according to promotional materials.
One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows-Primo Levi. The Oscar®-winning Helen Mirren will introduce audiences to Anne Frank's story through the words in her diary. The set will be her room in the secret refuge in Amsterdam, reconstructed in every detail by set designers from the Piccolo Theatre in Milan. Anne Frank this year would have been 90 years old. Anne's story is intertwined with that of five Holocaust survivors, teenage girls just like her, with the same ideals, the same desire to live: Arianna Szörenyi, Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard, Helga Weiss and sisters Andra and Tatiana Bucci. Their testimonies alternate with those of their children and grandchildren. Off "the set", a girl of today will lead us on a journey to get to know the places that were part of Anne's short life and her feelings. She speaks to us through social networks. In fact, photos and posts are her language, and in this way Martina gives us her interpretation of what she discovers, what she sees, from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany to the Holocaust Memorial in Paris, up to and including her visit to the secret refuge in Amsterdam. In the documentary we also hear the voices of Rabbi Michael Berenbaum, historian and professor of Jewish studies at various American universities.Original soundtrack by Lele Marchitelli. Produced in collaboration with Anne Frank Fond Basel.
What would Anne Frank's life have been like had she survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen? What would have happened to the hopes and dreams she wrote about in her diaries? What could she have told us about persecution, about concentration camps? How would she have interpreted the reality of today, the rekindling of antisemitism and new racisms? One thing for sure is that Anne is still a reference point, a looking glass through which teenagers can learn how to see the world and what questions to ask themselves. Anne wrote about herself, about what was happening to a Europe in flames, about Nazism. And in order to confide her fears and thoughts she invented an imaginary friend called Kitty.
Helen Mirren will introduce audiences to Anne's story through the words in her diary. The set will be her room in the secret refuge in Amsterdam, reconstructed in every detail by set designers from the Piccolo Theatre in Milan, part of the Union of European Theatres. It is a remarkably faithful, authentic reconstruction of the interior that will take us right back to 1942. The room contains the objects in Anne's life, the photographs she covered the walls of her room with, and the notebooks she wrote.
The young actress, Martina Gatti - has the role of guiding us through the places that were part of Anne Frank's life and those of the Holocaust survivors. She travels through Europe showing us the stages of Anne's short life. She is a young girl of today who wants to know about the story of the Jewish teenager who became a symbol of the greatest tragedy to befall the 20th Century, and she speaks to us through social networks. Photos and posts are her language, and in this way, Martina gives us her interpretation of what she discovers, what she sees, from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany (where Anne and her sister Margot died) to the Holocaust Memorial in Paris, up to and including her visit to the secret refuge in Amsterdam. Martina is one of the thousands of teenagers who feel close to Anne, and one of the many imaginary friends, the many Kitties all over the world who dream of having a special place in her heart.
Martina writes a sort of digital diary that speaks to her peers: a swift, effective way to place the tragedies of the past in relation to the present, to understand what an antidote could be today against all forms of racism, discrimination and anti-Semitism. It is her curiosity, her desire not to remain indifferent that allows us to rediscover how absolutely contemporary Anne Frank's words are, but also how powerful are the words of those who can still remember - those of Arianna, Sarah, Helga, Andra and Tatiana, and their parallel stories. Like Anne Frank they all suffered persecution and deportation when they were very young. They were denied the carefree light-heartedness of their youth, they lost their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends and loved ones in concentration camps. The stories of the survivors of the Holocaust put words on the blank pages of Anne's diary, since hers fell silent when everyone in the secret refuge in Amsterdam was arrested on August 4th, 1944. These women tell their stories, and sometimes their voices break with emotion, like Arianna, deported when she was 11, when she recalls meetings with her mother through the barbed wire at Auschwitz - but they also tell their stories with strength, defiance, and irony. One example is the description of the "surreal" game Sarah would organize in the camp with the other girls: a flea contest. Nobody won anything but it helped them survive.
In the documentary we also hear the voices of Rabbi Michael Berenbaum, historian and professor of Jewish studies at various American universities, Holocaust historian Marcello Pezzetti, director of the Holocaust Museum in Rome, French ethno-psychologist Nathalie Zajde, the testimony of Doris Grozdanovicova and Fanny Hochbaum, world-renowned violinist Francesca Dego, Yves Kugelmann publisher and member of Anne Frank Fonds, Basel, Ronald Leopold - director of the Anne Frank House, Alain Granat director of the online magazine Jewpopo, and photographer Simon Daval.
