MILAN – If she had not died in 1945 in Bergen Belsen, Anne Frank would now have been 90 years old. To commemorate her and never forget her story and the dramatic historical period of which she was a precious witness, #AnneFrank was born. Parallel Lives, a documentary in which Helen Mirren, Oscar winner for Best Actress for The Queen, will guide us and let us know and empathize more with Anne Frank. #AnneFrank. Parallel Lives , and written and directed by Sabina Fedeli and Anna Migotto, with the soundtrack by Lele Marchitelli, produced by 3D Produzioni and Nexo Digital in collaboration with the Anne Frank Fonds of Basel, Sky Arte, the Piccolo Teatro di Milano-Teatro d ‘Europa, out in Italian cinemas only on 11, 12 and 13 November .
“This is a story we must never forget. We are starting to lose the generation of witnesses to what happened in Europe in those terrible days . This is why it is more important than ever to keep the memory alive while looking to the future. With the wars in Syria, Libya, Iraq, with immigration that is affecting all of Europe, it is so easy to point the finger at different peoples, cultures, people and say “They are the cause of our problems” – says Mirren – For this I believe that Anne Frank’s diary represents an incredible teaching, a tool capable of offering a real understanding of human experiences from the past to our present and therefore into our future . I find it fundamental and that is why I wanted to take part in the project ”.
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Anne Frank, born in Frankfurt on 12 June 1929, would have turned 90 this year. The docu-film dedicated to her tells about it through the pages of her diary: an extraordinary text that has introduced millions of readers around the world to the tragedy of Nazism, but also to the brilliant intelligence and modern language of a young girl that she wanted to be a writer.
Anne’s story is intertwined with that of 5 Holocaust survivors, girls and adolescents like her, with the same will to live and the same courage: Arianna Szorenyi, Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard, Helga Weiss and her sisters Andra and Tatiana Bucci.What Anne Frank’s life would have been like if she could have lived after Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen
What would have become of her desires, of the hopes she wrote about in her diaries
What would she have told us about the persecution, about the concentration camps
How would she have interpreted current reality , the resurgent anti-Semitism, the new racisms
Of course and that, even today, Anne remains a point of reference, a mirror through which children learn to look at the world and ask questions . Anne wrote about herself, about what was happening in Europe in flames, about Nazism. And to confide in her his fears and reflections about her he invents an imaginary friend: Kitty.Helen Mirren accompanies viewers in Anne’s story through the words of the diary. The set and the room of the secret refuge in Amsterdam where the girl remains hidden for over two years. It was reconstructed in the smallest details by the scenographers of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano-Teatrouropa founded by Giorgio Strehler . An extraordinary and detailed environmental reconstruction that will take us back to 1942. In her room there are her objects from her life, the photographs with which she had wallpapered the walls, the notebooks on which she wrote. A digital diary
A young actress, played by Martina Gatti , has instead the role of guiding us to the places of Anne and the survivors of the Shoah. And she atravel around Europe to discover the stages of Anne’s short life . She is a young woman of today who wants to know the story of the Jewish teenager who became a symbol of the greatest tragedy of the 20th century and speaks to us above all through social media. The photos and posts of her are the language of her. Through these, Gatti tells and interprets what she discovers, what she sees, from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany (where Anne and her sister Margot die) to the Shoah Memorial in Paris, up to the visit to the secret refuge in the capital. Dutch. Martina represents one of the thousands of teenagers who feel close to Anne, one of the many imaginary friends, of the many Kitty who everywhere in the world dream of having a special place in Frank’s heart .
Martina writes a sort of digital diary capable of speaking to her peers: an immediate way to relate past tragedies to the present, to understand what the antidote against all forms of racism, discrimination and anti-Semitism is today. It is her curiosity, her desire not to remain indifferent, to make us rediscover the absolute contemporaneity of Anne Frank’s words, but also the power of the voices of those who can still remember. Those of Arianna, Sarah, Helga, Andra and Tatiana, the parallel stories. Like Anne Frank, they suffered persecution and deportation from a very young age. Their childhood was denied, they lost mothers, fathers, brothers, friends and loves in the concentration camps. The stories of the Holocaust survivors give voice to the silence in Anne’s diary, which suddenly ends with the arrest of all the guests of the secret refuge in Amsterdam on August 4, 1944. Women who tell their stories, sometimes interrupted by emotion. Like when Arianna, deported at 11, recalls her encounters with her mother through the barbed wire of Auschwitz. But in their narration there is also strength, challenge, irony. An example is the description of the “surreal” game that Sarah organized in the field with the other girls: a competition among fleas. Nothing was won but it helped to live. The invitation
On the occasion of the release of the docu-film, the Instagram profile @CaraAnneFrank was also born: like contemporary Kitty, we can all talk to Anne and the other witnesses by telling them our thoughts and emotions on the theme of memory. And this is the invitation addressed to students and readers on the occasion of #ANNEFRANK’s theatrical release. PARALLEL LIVES , which aims to highlight again the absolute contemporaneity of the message and the testimonies of Anne, Arianna, Sarah, Helga, Andra and Tatiana as a tool to decipher the current world and as an antidote against all forms of racism.
