Without Miep Gies,
The Diary of Anne Frank
would not have reached us.
Evoked with admiration in the memoirs of the young Jewish girl who died in deportation, the 30-year-old was the secretary of her father, Otto Frank.
A close friend, Miep, supported by three other colleagues, hid and supplied the family and their four roommates in the annex for two years, until their arrest by the Nazis.
Miep put Anne's writings away.
It is this figure from the shadows that the remarkable miniseries of Disney + A glimmer of hope
stages
.
It all started with the visit of American producer Tony Phelan (
Grey's Anatomy
) to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
Miep is mentioned over the notes:
“I was struck by his youth and his convictions.
She was in her twenties when she started working for Anne's father.
The age of my son full of hesitations, who is barely entering life.
Miep and her husband, Jan, also involved in the Dutch resistance, demonstrate that a gesture of kindness and generosity can make a big difference.
»
companions in misfortune
Careful research unearths fascinating little-known facts.
“Besides the Franks, the Gies housed a dozen Jews and dissidents.
Jan picked up babies given to him on the sly by Jewish nurses on the tram
,” underlines Tony Phelan.
Afflicted by his young compatriots' ignorance of the Holocaust at a time when conservative states like Florida are banishing
The Diary of Anne Frank
from libraries, deeming the teenager's words too crude, Tony Phelan has conceived
A glimmer of hope
as a family and general public gateway to the Second World War.
Read alsoDeath of Hannah Goslar, one of Anne Frank's best friends
He drew inspiration from color footage from liberation, but also from more recent historical films, like
Brooklyn
(2015)
, "to achieve something vibrant, immediate, far from the gravity and austerity that we suggest the black and white of the archives”.
As in Netflix's
Transatlantic
, the protagonists of
A Glimmer of Hope
flirt, laugh, dance, drink.
As Bel Powley and Joe Cole (
Peaky Blinders
), Miep and Jan develop an unconventional egalitarian modern marriage, tested by their respective secrets.
The series broadens Anne's child's gaze and rehabilitates the companions in misfortune who annoyed her so much: her mother (Amira Casar) and the dentist Albert Dussel.
Read alsoThe thesis of a denunciation of Anne Frank by a Jewish notary raises serious doubts
During filming, the urgency of the almost memorial project manifested itself in an unexpected and acute way.
In 2022, the invasion of Ukraine transformed Prague, where occupied Amsterdam was reconstituted, into a city of refuge for refugees.
Like an echo of the fate of the Franks, who had fled their native Germany...
