Ari Folman’s Where is Anne Frank? to premiere at Cannes

Folman’s film has been highly anticipated and much speculated about. There have been rumors for years about when it would be released

Ari Folman recieves the Cesar Award for Best Foreign Film  (photo credit: Reuters/Benoit Tessier)
Ari Folman recieves the Cesar Award for Best Foreign Film
(photo credit: Reuters/Benoit Tessier)
The answer to the question, “Where is Ari Folman’s Anne Frank movie?” has finally been answered. It will be shown at the 74th Cannes Film Festival in July, representatives of the festival just announced.
The festival lineup was released early in June, but Folman’s movie, which is actually called, Where is Anne Frank?, was a late addition. It will be screened out of competition. The film, like Folman’s breakout movie, Waltz with Bashir, is an animated film that looks at a serious subject. It picks up Anne Frank’s story after her death and is seen through the eyes of her imaginary friend, Kitty, which is the name Anne gave to the diary she kept throughout the years she hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam. She and her family were discovered in August 1944 and Anne died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Folman’s film will reportedly deal with Anne’s life once she and her family were caught by the Nazis and she had to abandon her diary, which was discovered after the war.
When he announced that he would be making a film about Anne Frank in 2013, Folman, the son of Holocaust survivors, told The Hollywood Reporter, “Bringing the Anne Frank diary to all screens is a fantastic opportunity and challenge. There is a real need for new artistic material to keep the memory alive for younger generations.”
Folman’s film has been highly anticipated and much speculated about. There have been rumors for years about when it would be released. Folman’s previous film, The Congress, was a mix of live action and animation with Robin Wright and was released in 2013.
Waltz with Bashir, which premiered at Cannes, was nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film in 2009. It established Folman as a force to be reckoned with in the international film world. An animated documentary about the experiences of Israeli soldiers in the first Lebanon War, it was widely praised for the quality of its animation and its originality.
Anne Frank’s diary has been filmed in an animated format before. In 1995, the Japanese director Akinori Nagaoka adapted it into an animated film version, Anne no nikki, known in English as The Diary of Anne Frank.