Jul 27, 2021

Watch the trailer for "Where is Anne Frank", Ali Forman's latest Cannes performance feature

Among the slim lineup of animation premieres at Cannes was Where Is Anne Frank, the latest feature from Israel's Ari Folman.

The director, whose Waltz With Bashir debuted at the festival in 2008, has reimagined the well-known story of the young Holocaust victim for his new film. Anne Frank appears alongside her imaginary friend Kitty, whom she described in her diary. Through this conceit, Where Is Anne Frank tells a tale that runs from the Nazi era to the present day, probing the relevance of Anne's fate to contemporary audiences. Watch the trailer below:

When Folman was approached by the Anne Frank Fonds foundation, he was initially skeptical of the project: “I thought there were too many adaptations and she was too iconic,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. He was convinced to do it by his mother, a survivor of Auschwitz. The idea to incarnate Kitty as a visual character came from a desire to tell Anne's story “to the youngest audience I could.”

Where Is Anne Frank received generally positive reviews out of Cannes. Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian: “Folman has created richly imaginative storytelling which unselfconsciously mixes the historical, the contemporary, and the supernatural.” In The Hollywood Reporter, Sheri Linden noted that “there's something surprisingly urgent in the way Folman and company turn clean, simple lines into full-blooded characters.”

The Belgium-Luxembourg-France-Netherlands-Israel co-production is produced by Jani Thiltges, together with Yves Kugelman, Folman, and Alexander Rodnyansky. The animation director is Yoni Goodman, who held the same title on Waltz with Bashir and Folman's The Congress. International sales are overseen by Wild Bunch International. No U.S. distributor has been announced.