Where is Anne Frank?
When I found out that Where is Anne Frank? will be released in Romanian cinemas, I rushed to become one of its first spectators. The reason I did so is predictable: it was due to my longstanding interest in the works of its creator, Ari Folman. The Israeli filmmaker’s name has become memorable for all cinephiles in search of new experiences back when, in 2008, the Cannes Film Festival opened with the astonishing Waltz With Bashir, a film that imposed the format of animation documentaries. A few months later, this self-reflexive film won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, thus rewarding the originality of this personal testimony of the author’s participation in the Lebanese War of 1982. Generated by his traumatic personal experience, Ari Folman (born in 1962) begins his investigation by noticing that he has lost his memories of his bloodied involvement in a battle that he didn’t really understand, at the very young age that he was drafted into the army. He admits to the fact that the film is rooted in his personal experience and thus from a subjective perspective. Waltz With Bashir recounts the handful of days in which Ari (now, a character) participated as a young recruit in the occupation of West Beirut, during the first Libyan War, and the events that transpired between the 16th and 17th of September 1982, when the army members that were guarding the Palestinian refugee camps allowed Christian Phalangists to storm the encampment and to massacre civilians. Although a state of confusion had gripped everything, an international committee put the moral blame for the devastation of West Beirut onto Israel, thus generating a sensation of guilt amongst its participants. Waltz With Bashir becomes a trip down memory lane, which destabilizes the convictions of his former brothers in arms, who were teenagers at the time of the massacre, and who were adults when the director was setting out on his investigation. Admitting to the fact that it’s a wholly autobiographical film, Ari Folman, a filmmaker who dabbled in documentaries and fiction films before (such as Comfortably Numb, 1991, which approached the First Gulf War and the fear that Israelis have for chemical weapons, Saint Clara, 1996, an adaptation of the eponymous novel written by Czech novelist Pavel Kohut, or Made in Israel, 1991, a futuristic tale about the search of the last Nazi left alive), he discovered animation in 2004, when he worked as a television director. He stated: “I was fascinated by the freedom that animation offered. I was tired of this endless search for sensational topics. I wanted to take a different look at documentaries and at animations, which are usually regarded as subjective creations, so I allowed myself to become free from traditional constraints.”1 This was the genesis of Waltz With Bashir – the hybridization of two apparently incompatible cinematic forms.
An increasing number of films are now opting for this hybrid formula, especially in order to describe major personal and collective traumas, with Flee (showcased at this year’s edition of the One World Romania Festival), directed by Danish filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen, which scored the record of being nominated for two Oscars at the 2021 edition of the awards – Best Animation Feature and Best Documentary.
Ari Folman returns to the international limelight with an animation that has a different formula, an ostensible adaptation of the Diary of Anna Frank, the famous journal kept by the teenage Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis together with her family in a house in Amsterdam between 1942 and 1944. Where is Anna Frank? doesn’t, however, attempt to faithfully represent the events told by the talented young writer. Confessing that he initially rejected the offer to direct this film, Ari Folman admits that he was convinced to pick up the project by his own mother, a survivor of the Auschwitz camp, taking a long time to work on the script that strives to modernize the meanings of the famous book, which was translated into 70 languages. He states: “Eventually, I read the diary again. I was intrigued by the possibilities of using animation to tell this story. My demands were to animate it, to make it for children, and to portray the last seven months of Anne Frank’s life in the camps [Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen], which is a story that has never been told artistically. And then to connect past to present, which was not easy.” 2 In order to create this connection, he needed “a narrative” device that would link facts with fantasy, which comes under the form of Kitty, an imaginary character who Anne Frank speaks to in her diaries. The reenactment of Anne’s story was prompted by Kitty’s visit to the house where the Frank family, now a museum in Amsterdam, seventy years later. Due to her intervention, we see details about the past (the discovery of the hidden room by Nazi officers, the family’s deportation to the camps in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, the moment the diary is interrupted, and Anne’s death from typhus in 1945). All of this back and forth between the present and the past serve as a means to tell that the only survivor of the befallen family, Otto Frank, is the one who was given the diary, and who published it starting in 1947. From Anne’s dialogue with her imaginary friend, Kitty, we also learn the story of the family that was forced to flee Germany in 1934 due to antisemitic oppression, later finding refuge in Amsterdam, and of the heroine’s educated opinions regarding the history of Jewish oppression across human history, starting from Ancient Egypt and leading up to the Nazi Era.
In a way, these are history lessons told captivatingly. Ari Folman made it so that everything related to the presence of Anne and Kitty would be rendered in colorful tones, in contrast with the monochrome nature of contemporary Amsterdam. As he explores the current landscape, the director unearths the drama of the recent refugees coming to Europe from war-torn Asian countries, modeling the story in a way that insists on calling for their protection, rejecting the idea of deporting them back to the dangerous areas from where they came from.
In Folman’s directorial strategy, there is an active preoccupation to not press the buttons of melodrama too heavily, as he sometimes opts for humorous counterweights or the description of Anne Frank’s cinephilia. We see how her room is plastered with photos of the era’s greatest Hollywood stars (amongst them, Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, and Greta Garbo) and, in the fantasy where she imagines the defeat of Hitler’s army, the winning forces are filled with the colorful characters one can see in the teenage films directed in America at the time. At this level, one can also feel the filmmaker’s pleasure in stating his own cinephilia, doubled down by a line that has a lively echo to this very day: “Of all the things that we were denied to us, it always seemed to me that not going to the cinema was the hardest one of them all.” Of course, we are tempted to associate this with the restrictions of the pandemic, and that we are accomplices to the message that Ari Folman especially outlines for his adult audience.
Opting once more for the freedom that the language of animation is capable of, the director manages to speak, without emphasis, in a moving manner about the tragedy of war, while catering his discourse to the expectations of teenagers. Once more, a film about the necessity of recovering memory, in the absence of which we cannot properly appreciate peacetime. Where is Anne Frank? deserves to be seen by any child “above the age of nine”, as its producers and distributors put it, and to be discussed together with parents and educators.
1. Renzi, Schweitzer, Ariel Schweitzer, interview published in Cahiers du cinema no. 635, June 2008, p. 29-30
2. www.indiewire.com, 24th of September 2021
Dana Duma is a film critic and a scholar, currently teaching at the National University of Theatre and Film in Bucharest. Member of FIPRESCI and of the Romanian Film Critics Association, she is a regular contributor to mainstream and specialized film press in Romania and abroad and a frequent member of international festival juries. Director of “Film” magazine, she also published the books Self portraits of Cinema-1983, Gopo-1996, Benjamin Fondane cineaste-2010, Woody Allen,a Bufoon and a Philosopher-2005, The History of Romanian Animation 1920-2020 and Filmmakers in the Digital Era (both in 2020).
