Despite my opinion that this movie could have been so much better, if it manages to get that message across to its target audience then it will have served its purpose and that purpose is eminently worthwhile.We ordered sandwiches, croissants, bread, and other baked goods while waiting for our entry time at the Anne Frank House. The witnesses to the Holocaust are nearly all gone now, their history is being rewritten and denied by those whose intentions are evil and it's more important than ever that those witnesses get to speak out now to generations to whom the Holocaust seems to be as far away and irrelevant to their lives as the Spanish Armada. That all those who are horrified by what happened in the Shoah should also be horrified by what's happening now to refugees and immigrants around the world and should draw the parallels between the populism, bigotry, hatred, and nationalism the Nazis parlayed into power and the populism, bigotry, hatred, and nationalism so many of our current governments are also parlaying into power. The most important message from this documentary was that the appeal of fascism and the urge to genocide has never gone away, that it is in fact back with a vengeance. I hope this is better received by the target audience than it was by me. This has been done so much better in other movies and documentaries. The usual pictures and films of what happened in the camps are, as always, horrifying, and I cried a little during the interviews with the five survivors but overall this was a wasted opportunity. Her social-media updates never rose above the level of "I wonder what you were thinking, Anne? #oppression". The girl had no character whatsoever, the only thing we learn about her is that she likes cake and nose-piercings. ![]() The movie's main trope was that of a teenage girl travelling to various places in Western Europe associated with Anne Frank and documenting her feelings on instagram-like social media. Mirren herself seemed to have pretty much dialled in her performance, a combination of overacting and not very believable emoting. This was effective in evoking the claustrophobia of life in the annex but seemed a little unnecessary. Helen Mirren narrated and linked various parts of the movie from what was said to be an exact reproduction of Anne Frank's bedroom, if you've ever been to the Frank house you'll know that the annexe is kept mostly empty at the wishes of Otto Frank. One survivor particularly moved me when she said "Our revenge against the Nazis is our children". ![]() This was moving and very well done, with each woman drawing parallels between what had happened in their childhoods and the rise, encouragement, and acceptance of racism and bigotry we see now. The heart of the movie was interviews with five women Holocaust survivors of the same age as Anne Frank would be now. That said I found the movie pretty shallow and in many ways annoying. First thing to remember is that it's directed at teenagers so it's not going to be quite as in-depth as something like Shoah, the gold-standard for Holocaust documentaries. Last night I went to see the movie documentary #Anne Frank: Parallel Stories (the hash tag is part of the title). TLDR If you want to watch a holocaust documentary that makes you feel detached from the events, this is it. Just the stories these women have to tell. The people behind this do not understand how to tell this story in a way that has impact and that does it justice.I wish someone would take the footage from the interviews with the survivors and edit it into a new documentary. Instead the main focus seems to be on showcasing Helen Mirren and doing some sort of modern teenage-friendly twist on Anne's story that no one asked for, with survivor accounts haphazardly thrown into the mix. Let us hear the survivors tell their stories. ![]() ![]() I'm prevented from feeling anything other than frustration. Then there's of course the zombie-like teenager with her insincere hashtags. Harrowing details and facts are recounted all matter-of-factly and stripped of their impact, and details that should be shared by the survivors themselves are for some reason retold by Mirren or some historian no one cares about. We are presented with gripping survivor accounts and harrowing archive footage, but they're constantly interrupted by Helen Mirren (who has no connection to the story, yet is given as much screen-time as one of the survivors) overdramatically reading from Anne's diary. I didn't think I could watch a documentary about the holocaust without crying.
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