Watch Anne Frank Remembered For Free

Just perfect...

Captivating movie !

The first must-see film of the year.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The story of Anne Frank is retold with actual childhood friends and her protector Miep Gies at 85 years old. The story has been retold countless times but it's an emotional journey of the world's greatest diarist. Anne Frank wanted to be a journalist and her diaries proved to be an invaluable tool in understanding the catastrophe of the Holocaust. Why would Hitler want to kill Anne and her friends and her relatives as well? For the most part, the journey takes from Frankfurt, Germany (Anne's birthplace) to Amsterdam where she and her family lived before they hid in the infamous attic. We get to see the attic from Miep Gies' point of view. The most touching moment is when she meets Fritz Werner Pfeffer (the dentist's son who survived the war in England). He would die two months later from cancer, we are told. The journey takes us to the dreadful camps with the survivors. Many of the Dutch Jews were caught in hiding and the Franks were four of them with four others. Otto Frank would be the only survivor. He was quite a gentleman. I loved Hannah's mother's saying about Anne Frank. She was quite a lively lovely young girl and her sister Margot too. If you get the DVD, you will be disappointed that there isn't anything else on there with special features.

The documentary is excellent, except for one element - the narration says "Polish death camps" - once and for all, please get this right - there were NO POLISH death camps! Poland was occupied by Germany and the death camps were German DEATH CAMPS SET UP BY THE Nazis! This is an important piece of history that is surprisingly perpetuated in a variety of printed and film material."Usage of the term has been condemned as insulting by the Polish foreign minister Adam Daniel Rotfeld in 2005, who also alleged that it—intentionally or unintentionally—shifted the responsibility for the construction or operation of the camps from the German to the Polish people." (quoting from Wikipedia) Even Obama had to apologize for using this term as late as May 2012. This wrong term must NOT be used anymore. Death camps were NAZI CAMPS, located in Nazi-occupied Poland!

The first half is interesting, mostly interviews with friends and neighbors of the Franks before and during their time in hiding. But so much of that basic material is familiar to any who have read the diary, or know the play that there were few revelations, and I wasn't sure what the fuss was about. But it is the second half of the film, that fills in with tremendous detail what happened to Anne and her family and friends after they were discovered, and after the diary ends that is overwhelmingly powerful. I've struggled with many films and books about the Holocaust. It's all almost too much for the mind to take in, reducing human suffering to insane numbers, or piles of dead bodies that the brain can set up a sort of emotional firewall around. That's why the most powerful piece of art about the holocaust I'd encountered before this was Elie Wiesel's "Night" – by reducing the nightmare to one specific young boy's experience I could finally feel the emotional impact of the fact that all these numbers and photos of mass graves were real human beings. 'Anne Frank Remembered' has that same kind of power; by focusing the holocaust to one family's very specific experience, it paradoxically makes the enormity of all the suffering real and present. And yet, like Anne Frank herself, this documentary, while overwhelmingly sad, also sees the good in people. As much as I wept (and boy did I weep) at the cruelty and death, I also wept at the courage and love shown by the friends and family who kept Anne alive, and the survivors who carry the memories of those who survived and chose to still embrace the world instead of running and hiding. How I wish I had that kind of courage and strength. A truly important document of the human experience.

This is a film that every child should see before they grow and get distorted often passed down ideas from generation to generation of family. I grew up in two different places although only 20 miles apart. I went to school & had friends of every color creed & religion for the first 8 years of my life. Then I moved to hillbilly country (although not anymore) where it was very unusual to even have one African-American kid in your class. My graduating class in high school had 2 or 3 African-Amercians (god why can't I just say Black? You can call me a honky or whitey or whatever! all of this political correctness peeves me as it does most others!) Anyway back to the film give this a try to see what happens when people get a distorted view or just what ignorance or a lack of understanding does to a culture or a country! This is an excellent film everyone should see especially children.