#Anne Frank: Parallel Stories Parent Guide

Anne Frank, known primarily through her diaries, has become perhaps the most well-known victim of the Holocaust. In this documentary, Helen Mirren explores the life of Anne Frank, but also examines the lives of other women who survived the horrors of the Nazi regime. The film looks at women of similar age, but with wildly different stories and experiences in the camps and it examines their lives afterwards. Meanwhile, an unnamed young woman (Martina Gatti) physically retraces Anne Frank’s life, trying to understand a person who has been gone for 75 year.

That second portion of the movie - the obviously staged travel - is almost completely superfluous. The young woman seems to function only as a visual focal point in the places to which she travels and although I’m not criticizing Gatti or her performance, I would have enjoyed the movie more without her. I think the film is trying to portray a personal effort to understand one person’s experience, instead of the usual historical exercise in comprehending the past as a whole. But it doesn’t always succeed, and Gatti’s character’s obviously fake social media posts with irrelevant hashtags seem unnecessary to the broader and much more interesting real stories.

The rest of the film is much better. The interviews with the survivors are the most valuable part of the film, providing a direct connection to one of the darkest parts of our history which we must not forget and about which we must educate ourselves. History loses irreplaceable assets as those who lived its events are lost, making these recordings invaluable to children in the future who have never had the opportunity to meet Holocaust survivors.

This documentary is especially valuable as an educational resource. It does not dwell on disturbing footage and has almost n profanity and scarcely any other content issues. The movie isn’t appropriate for young children due to some violent imagery and the mature subject matter, but if this had come out when I was in school, this is exactly what we would have watched in my ninth grade Social Studies class. It provides important information, modern perspectives, and broader context, all tied into a school-appropriate text. Teachers and parents could not ask for a better resource for introducing the history of the Holocaust to tweens and teens.