My Best Friend Anne Frank Parent Guide

Not even war can dim Anne Frank’s (Aiko Beemsterboer) and Hannah Goslar’s (Josephine Arendsen) zest for living. It’s 1942 and the 14 year old best friends live in Amsterdam under the brutality of Nazi occupation. As Jews, the girls and their families cope with restrictions, random acts of violence, and the constant threat of deportation to a concentration camp. These worries don’t stop the girls from giggling together, having tea parties, playing ball in the park, or obsessing about boys – and promising each other that they will always be together.

Fate has other plans, and the girls are soon separated. Anne and her family spend two years hiding in rooms above her father’s office before being betrayed and sent to Bergen Belsen. And Hannah eventually winds up in the same camp, bearing total responsibility for the care of her little sister. Then she hears a familiar whistle on the other side of the fence…

My Best Friend Anne Frank is a Dutch film, based on the memoirs of Hannah Goslar, who grew up with Anne Frank. The story is almost impossible to believe – the coincidence of the girls being able to reconnect in Bergen Belsen seems more likely to be dreamed up by a screenwriter than to have occurred in real life. Depending on your beliefs, it’s either a bizarre quirk of fate or the inscrutable mercy of God but in either case it has a powerful effect on Hannah, leading her to reconsider her priorities, her loyalties, and her sense of self.

Given its powerful elements – friendship, loyalty, sacrifice, faith, endurance, self-respect, and dignity in the face of brutality – this should be a better film than it is. The story is authentic and the acting is good, but the script itself seems to be the issue. (This might be partially a translation problem – I watched with subtitles and a dub track. It’s possible that the movie is better in the original Dutch.) Frankly, the biggest challenge for me is in the very core of the film – the friendship between Hannah and Anne. Anne’s diaries depict a girl who’s brave, curious, loyal, and emotionally intense. The Anne who appears in this film is selfish, manipulative, impulsive, reckless, and even cruel. She pressures Hannah into taking great risks, stands by and implicitly encourages another girl to humiliate Hannah, and embarrasses her friend with sexual material she doesn’t want to see. Why Hannah, who is dutiful, loyal, and conscientious, puts up with such a difficult friendship is never made clear. Her willingness to risk her life – and the safety of her sister – for such a demanding friend, is even less understandable.

Parents or teachers who are considering this film for teenage viewing can be assured that content is relatively minor for a Holocaust movie. There are upsetting scenes of violence and brutality perpetrated by Nazis but the worst events take place off screen. There are scenes of girls discussing French kissing and a brief moment where girls look at an anatomy book with explicit illustrations of female genitalia and sexual intercourse. Aside from that, swearing is infrequent and other content non-existent.

Readers of Anne Frank’s diary will certainly find this production interesting. But viewers looking for teen-friendly Holocaust films can certainly do better. (Scroll down for our suggestions.) A subject this weighty deserves a movie of equal heft and My Best Friend Anne Frank simply feels thin and incomplete. It could be that reducing Hannah to “Anne’s friend” instead of a person whose story is compelling on its own is part of the problem. A girl of her courage and loyalty deserves her own account; not to be seen through the prism of her relationship with her famous friend.