The story of Anne Frank is retold with actual childhood friends and her protector Miep Gies at 85 years old. The story has been retold countless times but it's an emotional journey of the world's greatest diarist. Anne Frank wanted to be a journalist and her diaries proved to be an invaluable tool in understanding the catastrophe of the Holocaust. Why would Hitler want to kill Anne and her friends and her relatives as well? For the most part, the journey takes from Frankfurt, Germany (Anne's birthplace) to Amsterdam where she and her family lived before they hid in the infamous attic. We get to see the attic from Miep Gies' point of view. The most touching moment is when she meets Fritz Werner Pfeffer (the dentist's son who survived the war in England). He would die two months later from cancer, we are told. The journey takes us to the dreadful camps with the survivors. Many of the Dutch Jews were caught in hiding and the Franks were four of them with four others. Otto Frank would be the only survivor. He was quite a gentleman. I loved Hannah's mother's saying about Anne Frank. She was quite a lively lovely young girl and her sister Margot too. If you get the DVD, you will be disappointed that there isn't anything else on there with special features.

The first half is interesting, mostly interviews with friends and neighbors of the Franks before and during their time in hiding. But so much of that basic material is familiar to any who have read the diary, or know the play that there were few revelations, and I wasn't sure what the fuss was about.

But it is the second half of the film, that fills in with tremendous detail what happened to Anne and her family and friends after they were discovered, and after the diary ends that is overwhelmingly powerful.

I've struggled with many films and books about the Holocaust. It's all almost too much for the mind to take in, reducing human suffering to insane numbers, or piles of dead bodies that the brain can set up a sort of emotional firewall around. That's why the most powerful piece of art about the holocaust I'd encountered before this was Elie Wiesel's "Night" – by reducing the nightmare to one specific young boy's experience I could finally feel the emotional impact of the fact that all these numbers and photos of mass graves were real human beings.

'Anne Frank Remembered' has that same kind of power; by focusing the holocaust to one family's very specific experience, it paradoxically makes the enormity of all the suffering real and present.

And yet, like Anne Frank herself, this documentary, while overwhelmingly sad, also sees the good in people. As much as I wept (and boy did I weep) at the cruelty and death, I also wept at the courage and love shown by the friends and family who kept Anne alive, and the survivors who carry the memories of those who survived and chose to still embrace the world instead of running and hiding. How I wish I had that kind of courage and strength.

A truly important document of the human experience.

A documentary on the life of Anne Frank, a Jewish girl whose family lived in hiding from the Nazis in a secret annexe in Amsterdam between 1942 and 1944, and whose book Het Achterhuis (translated as The Diary Of A Young Girl) has become symbolic of the horrors of the Second World War and is perhaps the most famous diary in history.

The story of Anne Frank is many things - uplifting, heartbreaking, profound - and this Academy Award-winning documentary is a fascinating and deeply moving study of her life and the abhorrent anti-Semitism of World War II. It details Anne's family's early life in Frankfurt, their move to Holland, their father's careful plans to hide out the war in the secret rooms of his company office, life in hiding, their betrayal by an unknown informer, and the horrors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where Anne and her sister Margot both died of typhus. It is a particularly intimate and touching film because of the participation of two women; Gies, who helped protect the Franks and rescued Anne's diaries when the Franks were captured, and Goslar, a close friend of Anne's from pre-war days who was imprisoned in a neighbouring labour camp. These women's courage, intelligence and humanity is simply extraordinary, and the candour with which they celebrate Anne's life is deeply moving, as are the testimonies of everyone else who knew her. Anne's strength lies in her universal free spirit; she was not perfect - by all accounts spoiled, precocious and short-tempered - but she was her own person, with a talent, imagination and desire to make her mark on the world. Everyone can identify with her, which makes the senseless obscenity of a war politic that murders innocent fifteen-year-old girls for the sake of their racial background all the more incomprehensible. Goslar sums it up eloquently, saying, "I cannot judge this whole period. Nobody can understand it I think.". The film concludes with an astonishing image; a few seconds' film of Anne standing at her window on the Merwedeplein, taken by an amateur cameraman filming a wedding in the street. There she is - a symbol of hope in the face of bigotry and hatred. With excellent music by Carl Davis, terrific narration by Branagh and Anne's diary excerpts read by Richardson. The film was financed by Blair, the BBC and the Disney Channel, and received a limited but well-deserved theatrical release.