New Italian-helmed documentary teams up with Holocaust victim's foundation.
By AMY SPIROAnne Frank in 1940(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
What would Anne Frank’s life have looked like if she had survived the Holocaust? Would she still be alive today, at age 89?An Italian production company is working with Anne Frank Fonds, the Swiss foundation established by her father in the 1960s, to create a new film exploring that idea. The film began shooting last month.According to Variety, the documentary will focus on five women who survived the Holocaust but also experienced “deportation, suffering and being denied their childhood and adolescence.” The filmmakers said they want to “be able to render/reveal that desire for life and youth that was also Anne’s and that allowed her to fight fear and resist, even under the most inhumane conditions.”The documentary, titled #Anne Frank Parallel Stories, is being created to mark what would have been her 90th birthday this summer.The film’s two directors, Italian TV journalists Sabina Fedeli and Anna Migotto, told Variety that the documentary will be “retracing Anne’s ‘places’ and ‘locations,’ so that audiences will be able to get to know her through several significant passages from her diary, and enter her world; the real as well as the imaginary.”The life of Anne Frank, a young Jewish woman from Frankfurt, Germany who lived with her family in hiding in Amsterdam for more than two years during the Holocaust, has been turned into countless films. In 1944, Frank and her family were discovered and sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died of typhus in 1945 at age 15.There have been dozens of films, documentaries, TV miniseries and plays about Frank’s life, based on the diary she left behind. A Dutch play in 2014 wondered how she would have told her story if she lived, and a short film that reimagines Frank surviving is currently in production.
