A documentary on the life of Anne Frank, a Jewish girl whose family lived in hiding from the Nazis in a secret annexe in Amsterdam between 1942 and 1944, and whose book Het Achterhuis (translated as The Diary Of A Young Girl) has become symbolic of the horrors of the Second World War and is perhaps the most famous diary in history.The story of Anne Frank is many things - uplifting, heartbreaking, profound - and this Academy Award-winning documentary is a fascinating and deeply moving study of her life and the abhorrent anti-Semitism of World War II. It details Anne's family's early life in Frankfurt, their move to Holland, their father's careful plans to hide out the war in the secret rooms of his company office, life in hiding, their betrayal by an unknown informer, and the horrors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where Anne and her sister Margot both died of typhus. It is a particularly intimate and touching film because of the participation of two women; Gies, who helped protect the Franks and rescued Anne's diaries when the Franks were captured, and Goslar, a close friend of Anne's from pre-war days who was imprisoned in a neighbouring labour camp. These women's courage, intelligence and humanity is simply extraordinary, and the candour with which they celebrate Anne's life is deeply moving, as are the testimonies of everyone else who knew her. Anne's strength lies in her universal free spirit; she was not perfect - by all accounts spoiled, precocious and short-tempered - but she was her own person, with a talent, imagination and desire to make her mark on the world. Everyone can identify with her, which makes the senseless obscenity of a war politic that murders innocent fifteen-year-old girls for the sake of their racial background all the more incomprehensible. Goslar sums it up eloquently, saying, "I cannot judge this whole period. Nobody can understand it I think.". The film concludes with an astonishing image; a few seconds' film of Anne standing at her window on the Merwedeplein, taken by an amateur cameraman filming a wedding in the street. There she is - a symbol of hope in the face of bigotry and hatred. With excellent music by Carl Davis, terrific narration by Branagh and Anne's diary excerpts read by Richardson. The film was financed by Blair, the BBC and the Disney Channel, and received a limited but well-deserved theatrical release.
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