Thirteen years after he came to Cannes with Waltz With Bashir — which would go on to win a Golden Globe and land both Oscar and BAFTA nominations — Israeli director Ari Folman brings another luscio…
about why it took just the right push from his mother — an Auschwitz survivor — to take on the project.
When I was approached by the Anne Frank Fonds [the foundation set up by Frank’s father, Otto Frank], I actually didn’t want to do it at all. I thought there were too many adaptations and she was too iconic. But I read the diary again, the first time since I was a teenager, and I also went to visit my mother — both my parents were Holocaust survivors.
Otto Frank always insisted on making her memory a universal thing, not to focus only on the tragedy of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the family. So what I tried to do is just to spread his legacy, and they were very supportive. I was looking for a new dimension, a new way to tell the story. And I tried to figure out how to bring it to the youngest audience I could. And when you start a movie with with a miracle, like with this creation of Kitty, you build the fairytale. Also, Anne Frank in her diary gave very precise instructions about how Kitty looked — it was obvious that she was her alter ego. Also, the voices are so important, and for Kitty we had Ruby Stokes.