By Yun-hua Chen.
The biggest challenge was how to portray the last seven months of Anne Frank’s life into images that can be accessible to children without going graphically too deep in terms of what really happened. This is how I found the solution through a lot of parallel visual ideas between the execution of the Jews during the Second World War and the Greek mythology Underworld and next life.”
“Dealing with the Past” program of the 28th Sarajevo Film Festival featured the Israeli director Ari Folman’s award-winning Waltz with Bashir (2008) together with his latest Where is Anne Frank (2021). Both being animation films, the former was based on the director’s personal experience as a conscript in the Israeli army from the days of the 1982 Lebanon War, whereas the latter, in collaboration with the Anne Frank Foundation, imagines the perspective of Kitty (voiced by Ruby Stokes) in modern Amsterdam, the imaginary friend of Anne Frank (voiced by Emily Carey) in her famous diary.
Premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, and directed and written by Ari Folman, Where is Anne Frank targets a younger audience and juxtaposes the real story of Anne Frank who died in the Holocaust during the Second World War with the quest of the imaginary character Kitty in present day. While Anne Frank’s diary, written in the hiding with her family in an attic in Amsterdam, is widely read and iconized, Ari Folman re-approaches the part of history and collective memory in a different light, and, in a way that is anything but a bland totem. In his film, Anne Frank is fondly remembered and searched for all over the city by Kitty, who was brought to life in the Anne Frank House Museum. Anne Frank and Kitty are portrayed as teenagers with worries and doubts no different from other teenagers. We relived some moments in Anne Frank’s life through Kitty’s eyes, while the director very self-consciously warns the spectator not to simplify the meaning behind Anne Frank’s name, which seems to be everywhere in Amsterdam all at once. Meanwhile, in Kitty’s exploration of the city, she befriends refugees, falls in love, and opens up new horizons that were not possible for Anne Frank.
It is through imagination and fantasy that history becomes alive, individual experience becomes universal, a cult-like figure becomes flesh and blood, and one of the most gruesome parts of human history becomes comprehensible and relatable to the younger audience. Where is Anne Frank, though not necessarily appealing to adults as much as the younger audience, is multifaceted, aesthetically balanced, and skillfully orchestrated, with its allusion to the Greek mythology deepening the scope of the film.
Your films are often concerned with war and trauma. How did you feel about showing Where is Anne Frank in Sarajevo, a place that is particularly marked by war?
After the screening of Where is Anne Frank, I was convinced that this is the best venue to screen it. There are a lot of similarities in terms of history of the nation and the way that people here treat their past and recover from traumatic past events. The screening here was very, very strong, and very emotional. When I am in Sarajevo, I have even come to believe that you are right, that my film topics are dealing with war and trauma. Usually I don’t think about it, this idea about post-trauma and war. I try to think of myself as pluralistic.
Why Anne Frank? What were your thoughts in making a film around it while avoiding all the cliches of totemism?
I was offered to make this film by the Anne Frank Foundation. Initially I turned it down because I didn’t think I had anything new to say, and maybe it is something that has been overly made. But, reading the diary again and again and thinking about my family’s history, I thought that maybe I should be the one to do it. Watching my kids growing up in the Israeli education system and seeing the way they were taught about the Holocaust and these traumatic events, I thought that it was dreadful to watch. I thought that maybe I could contribute something small that can potentially stay and will be seen by the younger generation.
How do you negotiate between showing the complexity of the story and making sure that the film is suitable for the younger generation?
The first thing is to create Anne Frank as a real person and not as an icon. She was growing up, going through her coming of age in captivity during a terrible situation, obviously, but at the same time she was facing the same issues that any teenager anywhere in the world is facing: first true love, maturity, relationship with each parent that is different, complexities in her relationship with her sister, feelings of envy, depression sometimes, and loneliness. This is what teenagers face. It is not unique to Anne Frank. It is very important to show the round personality of hers and the entire picture, instead of treating her as an icon.
I didn’t know what I was going to do. I knew that I had this intuition that told me that the answer was in the text and not in my imagination. It was in the text that just needed to be dug out. So, I started searching compulsively and reading the diary again and again until I probably read it 50 times the page where Anne Frank described her imaginary friend Kitty, and her description is very thorough. Kitty’s body, her face, her facial expression, her laugh, everything is there. When the designer created her, and I could see her on screen, I immediately understood that she was the protagonist of the movie and not Anne Frank. She can deliver the story.
What are your thoughts behind the juxtaposition between Anne Frank’s story and the refugee crisis in Europe in the film?
I don’t think there are any parallel facts, figures or, anything emotional between this and that. I don’t think anything is comparable, between the genocide of one people and others. If you look at these specific topics that are portrayed in my movie, you can see that one and half million Jewish children that were murdered during the Holocaust, they were not even lucky enough to reach the stage of becoming refugees. No one was fighting for them, in the way that people in the movie were fighting for the refugees from Central Africa. This one thing shows that there is no parallel, but people tend not to understand it.
Usually, I am not concerned at all with audiences, but as I did this film for a specific audience, I cannot lie about the fact that this was my biggest motivation. So, it became tough in many ways.”
I read that there are education programs surrounding this film since the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Did you feel that the film has the impact that you had in mind?
Unfortunately not. Cannes was such as prime point but when you walked out of there and walked into the real world, you would realize that Cannes is a bubble. It’s the shrine of cinema and it’s a closed-knit cult. It unfortunately does not always reflect how things are. With Waltz with Bashir, the explosion after what happened at Cannes was effective in waves all over the world afterwards. The film had its quest and a trajectory of its own, but for this film, it was kind of misleading at Cannes also because back in July 2021 cinemas were hardly working. As the welcome that Where is Anne Frank received in Cannes was so good, the distributors were eager to release what they thought would work outside this cult, this religion of Cannes. But, it was way too early. In summer of 2021, expect for Dune and a couple of big Marvel movies, nothing worked. That was it. And then, you can only have one shot in distribution. So, I thought it was too early, the release time. Now, more than a year later they are releasing it in the UK. It’s been only two days on screen, so I don’t know the numbers. I am sure it would be better. And then it will be released in autumn in the US, so the film industry needed time to heal. It was very risky going out in summer in France last year. Films were tanking. Also, cinema in general is changing. For a film like this, since we would probably aim for the young audience and families, we’d better go on big streaming platforms. There are better chances there. Usually, I am not concerned at all with audiences, but as I did this film for a specific audience, I cannot lie about the fact that this was my biggest motivation. So, it became tough in many ways.
This film targets the younger generation. They have a very different relationship with cinema since they are avid consumers of short videos and users of TikTok…
I look at my kids growing up. They are just a totally different species. I am not criticizing. I think they have a lot of advantages in the life that they lead. For example, the access to knowledge which is incredible. If they know how to use it and not just use TikTok, what they can do in their new life is incredible. On the other hand, obviously they watch movies at home and on their smartphones. It’s like they cannot concentrate on anything. On the other hand, you can build non-linear stories. In the script we have those jump cuts between past and present all the time. Older people in my team like my producers were all like, the kids will not get it. I was like, are you kidding me? Do you know how they jump and what their pace of life is? They cannot even finish listening to a song in its entirety. A song is too long if it is four minutes. The new generation are different people. We don’t know yet what they are going to turn into, but for sure they are not less intelligent. They don’t read books. How can they read Dostoevsky, with their computer, phone and video games? They don’t have the peace of mind. Is it that bad? No, it is not.
What were your thoughts behind the aesthetics? How was your collaboration with Lena Guberman?
Usually when you have films like this one that is dealing with the past, and you have both the present and the past, you would say that, the contemporary time is very vivid and the palette of colors is bright, and when you go to the past, it would be black and white, or it would be monochrome, brown or whatever. But, the world was not in black and white. It was in colors. And I thought, if we go with Anne’s imagination, the past is very vivid, very colorful, and dreamy, and the present today in Amsterdam is very gloomy; it is also because it is winter. On top of it, we have dream sequences, and we decided that we don’t constrain ourselves into limited ways of thinking. We go wild. With the design of animated characters, at the extreme end of the spectrum, there are realistic characters like Bashir. In that case I was trying to follow reality and I was worried back then that I would not be able to convince people that the animation was a real story. At the other extreme end, you have Popei, a total cartoon, so you need to place yourself at some point on this spectrum. So, we took the middle and went towards the comics. Also, it was a blessing for the animators. The less the characters are realistic, the easier it would be to move them.
What was the biggest challenge in this research-intense project?
The biggest challenge was how to portray the last seven months of Anne Frank’s life into images that can be accessible to children without going graphically too deep in terms of what really happened. This is how I found the solution through a lot of parallel visual ideas between the execution of the Jews during the Second World War and the Greek mythology’ Underworld and next life. While in Greek mythology you have ferries, in the Second World War you have trains. The selection in Greek mythology was done by Hades, the God of the Underworld, and the selection there was done upon the arrival at the camp. You have this phase when the victims needed to part from all their belongings. So, a lot of visual elements are parallel. I decided to create this magnificent, beautiful Underworld world on the visual side. On top of it, on the audio side we bring in the testimonials about what happened. It’s not only about approaching children. I think in general it is not watchable to bring realities of horror onto the screen. It’s just too much.
For your future project do you plan to take such a long time to work on a project again?
No, I always say no, but I don’t know. Now I am developing a live action movie with one fragment of CGI. It’s called Death and the Penguin, an adaptation of a Ukrainian novel written by Andrey Kurkov. I don’t have time to do another eight-year movie. I am really in conflict with me and myself about what filmmaking in the new era means. And I am trying to figure it out. I don’t have straight answers.
Yun-hua Chen is an independent film scholar. Her work has been published in Film International, Journal of Chinese Cinema, and Directory of World Cinema. Her monograph on mosaic space and mosaic auteurs was published by Neofelis Verlag, and her contribution to the edited volume titled Greek Film Noir is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press.