Anne Frank, Minha Melhor Amiga

The movie has Anne Frank in the title, but it stars a different person. A friend of hers, who has her own journey and her own struggles ... and her own problems to survive. That being said, that should not deter you from watching this.

Nor the fact that it switches from good times to a harsh reality - which makes viewing this quite the hard task to say the least. Just when you see the girls/friends happy, you get taken away from that and shown concentration camps or other horrible things that (mainly) Jews had to endure back then.

Watching this - one can only hope that comparisons that are being made right now, are going to stop. I do not want to get too political, but when there is a pandemic, you should not compare yourself to people that were actually hunted and had to die for no reason at all - and not being able or having a choice in the matter.

But the movie was not made to be compared to nowadays. It was made to show how cruel or rather how horrible of a time it was back then ... and in that the movie succeeds.

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.

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.

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.

This film tells an honest story about two best friends during the Second World War in the Netherlands. The film is told through the eyes of Hannah, Anne Frank's best friend. You see two teenagers who try to hold their own under sometimes difficult circumstances. It is a film that does not make us forget what happens when one group oppresses another. An absolute must see.