Anne Frank, la mia migliore amica

Hanneli and Anne are best friends in Amsterdam, together with another small bunch of teenage girls. Unfortunately, they are Jews and are vilified on a daily basis by the Nazis. Still, they try to enjoy themselves, thinking about boys and trying to escape reality. If their daily life is not happy in 1942, worse is yet to come.

Apart from the lack of suspense, because everybody knows what happened to Anne and it's clear that Hanneli survived since she's telling the story, the big issue with this narrative is that you never really get to know Hanneli and Anne comes across as a big teaser and a silly teenage, obsessed with boys. Surely, Frank was not a saint and this should not be a hagiography, but the level of silliness and teasing is laid down too thick.

It doesn't help that the timeline shifts back and forward continuously, between the last happy days in Amsterdam and life in Bergen-Belsen and it helps even less watching the movie in the English version. Hanneli parents speak German to her and between then and she answers in English (Dutch in the original) so one may wonder what's going on in that family. There is no explanation about the fact that they were Germans escaping the persecution and Hanneli herself should have been speaking German.

More mess in the concentration camp, where a Hungarian woman's spoken part is not translated or subtitled, so you end up following a "dialogue" with Hanneli speaking English, someone answering in German, and someone else in Hungarian.

An interesting portrayal of Anne Franks best friend Hannah Goslar and their relationship as teenage girls growing up in Nazi occupied Amsterdam.

I thought they portrayed Anne is a slightly annoying brat who at one point emotionally tormented Hannah by ignoring her.

However I thought the idea of showing Hannah's story was a powerful and fresh point of view to what million of Jews horribly endured during World War Two.

Not a classic but still a very sad story.

Told from the perspective of Anne Frank's closest companion, Hannah Goslar (who is still alive at 93), this fictionalized movie jumps back and forth between their idyllic life in Amsterdam and what inevitably happened to them after the Nazis took them away. Of course, the latter scenes are necessarily harsh and provide the heartbreaking moments you fully expect from the outset. The problem is that Anne comes across as capricious in the pre-camp scenes while Hannah remains stoic and devoted. Director Ben Sombogaart's simplistic approach seems at odds with the touching story despite affecting performances from the two leads, Josephine Arendsen as Hannah and Aiko Beemsterboer, who bears a striking resemblance to the real Anne Frank.

A beautiful film about the friendship between Anne Frank and her friend Hannah. Do not care what others have voted down about the film, it is touching and sensitive and it will be difficult to keep the tears away.

Emotional and authentic film, definitely worth seeing!

I took it as a nice surprise that they showed a different point of view than most of Anne's films. Here she is more sassy, she acts more playfully, ignoring the fact that something very bad is happening in her town, she wanted to have fun, have jokes, kiss boys (and maybe girls?) was a good point. What was missing was the budget to work better in some scenes. And I feel that the actresses had too little experience to show the full vividness of what it was like to be a teenager in 1942.