Laatste zeven maanden van Anne Frank

Audio engineer should be disqualified from ever again working in this industry. For that matter, so should whoever did the lousy subtitles. This is, in fact, a reasonably decent documentary about Anne Frank but is rendered almost unwatchable by the botched soundtrack. Can't this be fixed??

The above is the English title of the Dutch documentary (available with English dubing or subtitles, I can't remember).

This is a documentary that tells the story of Anne Frank during the last Seven months of her life (August 1944 to March 1945) in the concentration camps of Westerbork, Auschwitz, and Bergen Belsen as told by 8 women who knew she and Margot. This includes Hanna Pick Goslar (Lies Goosens in the diary) who was Anne's childhood friend and who met up with her at Belsen 2 months before she died. It also includes Janny Brandislipper (SP?) who is believed to be one of the last people to see Anne and Margot alive, and her sister. Another was a schoolmate of Margot.

There is also a companion book available. Both book and movie are extremely hard to find and I had to go through an Amazon.com marketplace seller to find them and paid quite a bit. But if you are a die-hard Anne Frank student then I highly recommend them.

My impression is that the content of this film is quite good. However I did not get 10 minutes into it because of the absolutely atrocious layering of the audio in the soundtrack. The music underneath the narration is overbearing. And the use of simultaneous speech into languages is unintelligible. This is really too bad, because I am very interested in the content of the film. I hope other viewers have better luck, or more patience, to hear what this film has to say.

I read the book that goes with this documentary many years ago. I had always wanted to see the film. What a disappointment. I was so let down by the production quality. The background music is SO loud it is distracting to the dialogue...and the English translations are simultaneously played with the original language so that it is impossible to decipher what anyone is saying. I gave up trying to understand. I wish someone would fix this and rerelease this film. It's an important topic that should not be missed. Willy Lindwer does such good work and I admired the book and very much would like to see this documentary.