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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good for Beginners, March 18, 2001
This is a nice video overview of the life of Anne Frank produced by A&E's Biography. The people at Biography almost always do a nice job and this episode is no exception. There's not a lot of detail but there are some nice interviews with people like Otto Frank and Miep Gies. Hearing their voices adds something for those who have only read of them. This is what I think is the true power of videos like this--it allows readers to put faces and voices to names. I think this video is also nice because is fills in the spaces around the period covered by Anne in her diary, particularly what happened after the Franks were arrested and Anne could no longer write. It is important for people who have only read the diary itself to become aware of these other events. On the other hand, no video (even the best of them--Anne Frank Remembered) can presently compete with the quality of written material out there. There are so many excellent books covering every segment of Anne's life that it would be a shame for someone who is truly interested in Anne to limit themselves to this video.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Remembering Anne, October 12, 2010
Although just under an hour, the 1998 A&E Biography special on Anne Frank does a wonderful job of exploring her life and the positive effects her diary has had on the world. Interviews include a 1979 clip from Anne's father Otto, Miep Gies, and childhood friends Hanneli Goslar and Jaqueline van Maarsen.
Helmuth "Hello" Silberberg, a good friend of Anne's shortly before the Franks went into hiding, also shares his memories of the girl. His brief but interesting clip is reason enough to check this out. It's not said on the special, but Hello and his family were liberated in Belgium the very same day the members of the Secret Annex were shipped from Westerbork to Auschwitz. How tragic is that?
Hannah recalls her short reunion with her friend over a Bergen Belsen fence and Anne's miserable, lonely death of typhus (just a few day after her sister Margot's) is sobering, to say the least. However, her legacy continues when a Broadway play about her life in hiding opens to rave reviews in 1955 and a film adaptation follows a few years later.
Unfortunately, both take her famous line "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart" out of context in order to paint her as a saint. Many of the interviewed subjects point out that Anne was a creature of her moods like the rest of us. She constantly wrestled with her feelings about war and mankind, but she was loved because she was a regular girl like all the other girls. Except that she had an extraordinary talent for writing.
For a more detailed portrait of Anne, I'd recommend the documentary Anne Frank Remembered. But this is one isn't a bad place to start.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must for admirers of the diary, August 2, 2009
This review is from: Biography - Anne Frank: The Life of a Young Girl (A&E DVD Archives) (DVD)
This is a must for readers and admirers of the diary of Anne Frank. In effect, the DVD completes the story--what was life like before the Frank family went into hiding, and what became of the family members after the family was discovered. All that is missing is the name and motive of the person who reported the family to the Gestapo.
There are many photos of the participants, photos I'd never seen. There is also a too-brief tour of the Annex where Anne wrote her diary--and photos of the diary itself.
Among those interviewed on camera are Otto Frank, Anne's father, Miep Gies who risked her life to help the people hiding in the Annex, girlhood friends of Anne, and a girl who saw Anne in her last days at Bergen Belsen concentration camp.
But beware: this is all but certain to clear out the tear ducts. As any reader of the diary knows, this is a great tragedy, the story of a great loss.
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