After returning from Auschwitz, Otto Frank, the only survivor of the family, is confronted with Anne's diary. He renews ties with his daughter by reading it. The film tells the story of what he went through, how the loss of his family scarred his life, how he dealt with the dilemmas that the publication of the diary brought upon him and how he made a memorial of his daughters legacy and became the father-figure for thousands of young readers worldwide.

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SYNOPSIS

Otto Frank, 55 years old, spent the ice cold winter months of 1944/45 in Auschwitz. He was ill, had been separated from his family, and struggled to find the moral strength to survive. Fellow prisoner Sal de Liema, then aged 29, remembers how one day Otto came to him with an unusual request. "Otto missed his children so much that he asked me to call him Daddy." Initially Sal refused, but Otto explained to him: "I am the kind of man who needs this. I need someone to be a Daddy to."

Sal was not even distantly related, but "eventually I agreed." Frank survived Auschwitz and after a journey of many months returned to Amsterdam. Around the same time that he learned his family had been killed, Anne's diaries came into his possession. He left them to one side, unread, for several months. He wrote to his mother: "I don't have the strength to read them". After a while he did start to read them. "Only a few pages a day, that's all I can manage. It is a revelation to me. These written pages reveal a completely different Anne to the child that I lost." He wrote to his mother: "What I read is so indescribably exciting... She writes about her own growing up with incredible self-criticism."

Intensely emotional, he read a few pages from the diaries out loud to his friends. They were deeply moved and urged him to publish them. Otto Frank felt a huge responsibility. Can you publish your own daughter's diary? What about the parts that Anne would not have intended for publication? To what degree should the privacy of the main characters be respected? What to do about sexually explicit scenes, and the arguments between Anne and her mother?

In this first film about Otto Frank we see how he, the only surviving member of those who had been in hiding together in Het Achterhuis, coped with the loss of his family. How he found a renewed bond with his daughter through the diaries, and how his life gradually came to be lived in the service of her legacy. About the decisions he made, the sacrifices they required, and the solace he found in seeing Anne's diaries become one of the most read books in the world, and the Anne Frank House one of the most famous holocaust memorials.

STILLS
AFF, Bazel / AFS Amsterdam

  

ARTWORK

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