Anne Frank Remembered
Using previously unreleased archival material in addition to contemporary interviews, this Academy Award-winning documentary tells the story of the Frank family and presents the first fully-rounded portrait of their brash and free-spirited daughter Anne, perhaps the world's most famous victim of the Holocaust.
-
- Cast:
- Kenneth Branagh , Glenn Close , Anne Frank
Similar titles
Reviews
I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.
This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.
This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.
It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.
The first half is interesting, mostly interviews with friends and neighbors of the Franks before and during their time in hiding. But so much of that basic material is familiar to any who have read the diary, or know the play that there were few revelations, and I wasn't sure what the fuss was about. But it is the second half of the film, that fills in with tremendous detail what happened to Anne and her family and friends after they were discovered, and after the diary ends that is overwhelmingly powerful. I've struggled with many films and books about the Holocaust. It's all almost too much for the mind to take in, reducing human suffering to insane numbers, or piles of dead bodies that the brain can set up a sort of emotional firewall around. That's why the most powerful piece of art about the holocaust I'd encountered before this was Elie Wiesel's "Night" – by reducing the nightmare to one specific young boy's experience I could finally feel the emotional impact of the fact that all these numbers and photos of mass graves were real human beings. 'Anne Frank Remembered' has that same kind of power; by focusing the holocaust to one family's very specific experience, it paradoxically makes the enormity of all the suffering real and present. And yet, like Anne Frank herself, this documentary, while overwhelmingly sad, also sees the good in people. As much as I wept (and boy did I weep) at the cruelty and death, I also wept at the courage and love shown by the friends and family who kept Anne alive, and the survivors who carry the memories of those who survived and chose to still embrace the world instead of running and hiding. How I wish I had that kind of courage and strength. A truly important document of the human experience.
I was forced to watch this farce of a dairy now proved to be false and fictitious, the only thing true may be the the characters named in the book, we will never know for sure.This farce was written by Mr. Vandam's secretary and portions of the supposed diary written with ball point pens which were not in use that the time when the fake diary was written.It is difficult watch this boring movie, it's slow in many places and dreary. Not worth the time of watching this false story badly written, badly acted video. Also explores sexuality, something that should not be shown to children.Don't Bother
I first saw this documentary at the theater when it first came out in the spring of 1996, albeit in a limited art-house release in selected cities (thank God Chicago was one of them). I happened to see it at the famed "Music Box Theater" on Southport Avenue in Chicago to a packed audience (the same theater John Cusack takes his date to on "High Fidelity"). After the credits were over, the audience was so dumbstruck, not a soul moved or said a word until the theater staff turned on all the lights and dropped the curtains -- it was as if people wanted to stay and talk about it. But alas, that wasn't part of the program, and we shuffled off deep in our thoughts, although a few of us caught up later at the coffeeshop next door to talk about it. It was that moving.This is the best documentary on Anne Frank I have ever seen, and is one of the best documentaries to come out of the 1990's. It should not be missed, and should be revisted as often as possible. Kenneth Branagh's narration is gripping and beyond comparison. The tranche de la vie recounting of Anne's as well as her friends' childhood experiences from her former playmates are extremely moving.One of my favorite scenes in this documentary was the meeting filmed in 1995 between Dr. Fritz Pfeffer's (called Albert Dussel by Anne in her diary) son, Mr. Pepper, and Miep Gies. When he said "vielen Dank" to Miep Gies for hiding his father, there wasn't a dry eye in the house, especially when it was revealed that the son later died just weeks after the meeting. The most moving scene, however, was the serendipitously acquired 8mm black-and-white home movie footage of a wedding filmed in June of 1941 on the Merwedeplein in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (the Franks moved to Amsterdam from Frankfurt a.M., Germany in 1933).In the footage, as the bride and groom emerge from the entrance of a three-flat townhouse, the camera pans upward and catches a waving 12-year-old girl waving happily from a second-floor window. The girl is Anne Frank, and is the only motion picture footage of her known to be existence. Anne's brief bout with the silver screen continues to be one of the most haunting reminders of what could've been, hope unfulfilled, and the tragedy that was the Holocaust. A must see for all those interested in history.
The Diary of Anne Frank is the second best-selling nonfiction book in the world, and for good reason. Nonetheless, sitting through this documentary about her life, which fills in some of the details where the diary left off, I thought, "Just another documentary about Anne Frank." I found it to be competent but not extraordinary. That was my complacent attitude because I was already well aware of the story of Anne Frank; most of what the documentary had to tell me wasn't news to me.Everything changed, though, when I got to the end of the documentary---when I saw the motion picture footage of Anne Frank. The emotional impact of seeing this footage, only a second or so long, made everything that came before it a thousand times more real---but not just everything that was in the documentary; everything I had previously known about Anne Frank suddenly became more real to me, more personal. I'd always been moved by her story, but when I saw that footage, what I felt was stronger and deeper and more profound than any other film experience of my life. (I knew beforehand that this documentary contained live footage of Anne Frank, and I'd even seen the footage in a movie review on television, but seeing it in the context of the documentary was a completely different experience. It's not likely that my mentioning it here will spoil it for anyone.)I realize now that many people still don't know the story of Anne Frank; it's discouraging at times to be witness to this kind of ignorance. I think to myself, "How could someone NOT know the story of Anne Frank?" This being the case, though, ANNE FRANK: REMEMBERED, along with reading her diary, is the best place to start. It's a story that everyone should know.