REVIEWS

This Dutch production, the first one made about Anne Frank in her homeland, is actually the second screen adaptation of Alison Leslie Gold’s Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend (1997), coming after an Italian version filmed back in 2009. Novelist and non-fiction writer Gold based her book on the recollections of Hannah Goslar (played by Josephine Arendsen) and with whom Frank struck up a close friendship during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Mixed in with this is Hannah’s wretched existence in the Bergen-Belsen camp in the last days of the war, with typhus fever running rampant and prisoners starving to death, where the teenager must take care of her baby sister, Gabi, who doesn’t understand what is happening and is prone to walking off at roll call or stealing bits of food on impulse.

is middle-of-the-road fare that means