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Anne Frank Remembered
DVD cover
Directed by	Jon Blair
Produced by	Jon Blair
Written by	Jon Blair
Starring	Kenneth Branagh, Joely Richardson
Music by	Carl Davis
Cinematography	Barry Ackroyd
Editing by	Karen Steininger
Distributed by	Sony Pictures Classics
Release date(s)	8 June 1995 (TV premiere) 23 February 1996 (theatrical)
Running time	117 min.
Language	English

Anne Frank Remembered is a 1995 documentary film by Jon Blair about the life of the diarist Anne Frank. The documentary was made in association with Anne Frank House, Walt Disney Pictures and the British Broadcasting Corporation. It was originally screened as a TV documentary, but was later given a theatrical release by Sony Pictures.

The film is narrated by Kenneth Branagh and extracts from Frank's diary are read by Joely Richardson. The choice of an adult reader is unusual in representations of Anne Frank; Blair has explained that he read Frank's diary as a child, and had a very clear image of what she was like, and found that the use of children's voices robbed the viewer of their own impression of Anne Frank.

Miep Gies, the woman who had helped shelter the family, and who had saved the diary after the group was betrayed, collaborated with Blair and is interviewed about her memories of hiding the Frank family. Blair also uses interviews with Hanneli Goslar and Jaqueline van Maarsen, two of Anne Frank's friends, and notably uses archive interviews of Otto Frank to retell Anne's story.

The film also records the first meeting between Miep Gies and Werner Peter Pfeffer, the son of Fritz Pfeffer ("Albert Dussell" in the Diary), who died shortly after the filming. In a moving scene, filmed as it happened, a tearful Pfeffer offers "Vielen Dank" ("many thanks")to Gies for her efforts to save her father.

Blair filmed in the real locations of Frank's life; including the neighbourhood Anne grew up in, the "Achterhuis" of Prinsengracht 263 (where she and her family lived in hiding) in Amsterdam, and the Westerbork and Auschwitz Concentration Camps. Blair commented that Auschwitz had been filmed a number of times, for many reasons, however he wanted to suggest something of the "ghosts" of the people that had passed through there, and so he determined that the only way to do this would be to film at night. He was also able to obtain a train similar to those used during World War II to recreate the scenes of people being transported to Auschwitz.

As the film was made in association with Anne Frank House, it was able to include the only known film footage taken of Anne Frank. The short film was made in 1941 of a wedding in the Amsterdam suburb where the Frank family lived. The camera cuts for just seven seconds to a balcony, where Anne Frank stands watching the bride and groom on the footpath below.

The film won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature in 1996.^[1] The award was jointly collected by Jon Blair and Miep Gies, who received a standing ovation.

See also

• The Diary of Anne Frank (1959 film)
• The Attic: The Hiding of Anne Frank (1988 TV film)
• Anne Frank: The Whole Story (2001 mini series)
• List of Holocaust films

References

External links

• Anne Frank Remembered at the Internet Movie Database
• Anne Frank Remembered at Rotten Tomatoes
• Sony classics interview with Jon Blair about the making of Anne Frank Remembered
• Anne Frank House link to film image of Anne Frank (requires Quicktime Player)