My best friend Anne Frank (2021)

Directed by: Ben Sombogaart | 103 minutes | drama, war | Actors: Aiko Beemsterboer, Lottie Hellingman, Björn Freiberg, Stefan de Walle, Roeland Fernhout, Zsolt Trill, Josephine Arendsen, Hans Peterson, Adél Jordán, Tünde Szalontay

‘My best friend Anne Frank’ is an excellently decorated and acted teenage film, starring Josephine Arendsen as Hannah Goslar. 12+ Holocaust drama? Upper school masters at primary school don’t have to worry too much about it. This film is a tribute to the resilience of an underexposed friendship in Anne Frank’s history and to the life force of teenagers.

In a dramatic sense, Hannah is a mirror character of Anne, less playful, and a Holocaust survivor. The story of the friendship is perhaps more unique than the Diary: Jewish best friends from Amsterdam lose each other during the war as a result of deportation, and find each other temporarily through a fence at the separation of two concentration camps. The blue Hannah is in the better camp, grows in her responsibility for a younger sister and is liberated; the cheeky Anne and her older sister Margot are starved in Bergen-Belsen.

How does director Sombogaart (‘The Twins’) dramatically shape this special story? With attention to detail, an excellent cast (including Fernhout as Hannah’s father) and two excellent young protagonists. The 17-year-old Aiko Beemsterboer looks very much like the real Anne and the 15-year-old Arendsen, who takes on the role of Hannah, plays the stars of heaven – both as a school friend in Amsterdam and during the hardships in the camp.

The plot could have had a little more depth. A chronological story would mean that time in the concentration camp would be limited in the movie relative to the school years; Sombogaart has overcome this with flashbacks, but the arbitrariness in the respective fate of Hannah or Anne is insufficiently explored. The encounters at the camp fence could also have played a bigger role; that is offset by an excellent Arendsen in the epilogue.

Anne’s story is world famous; Hannah’s less so, she moved to Palestine and worked there as a nurse. The two orphaned sisters Goslar had 7 children and 27 grandchildren, ‘as revenge on Hitler’, it reads.