There's a storm, rain is beating down Amsterdam, and a miracle happens inside the museum on the Prinsengracht.

The glass cube in which Anne Frank's world-famous diary is kept shatters, ink stains drip onto the pages, the letters fall off the paper and move in the air.

A figure is formed from them: a red-haired girl in an old-fashioned dress.

Alexander Juergs

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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It is Kitty, the imaginary friend, to whom Anne Frank wrote her diary, in which she tells of the time she was hiding in the back building in Amsterdam.

Seven decades after the Jewish girl was murdered in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, her friend suddenly comes to life.

And painfully has to realize that Anne, who wrote to her so clairvoyantly and honestly about being in danger, is long gone.

Visually stunning, impressive, oscillating between past and present, Israeli director Ari Folman (who already set standards with "Waltz with Bashir" in terms of dealing with memory) tells in his animated film "Where is Anne Frank?" about the diarist and the girlfriend she dreamed of.

The film, on which Folman worked for more than eight years, was shown on Sunday as a German preview in the cinema of the Frankfurt Film Museum.

It will normally hit the cinemas in 2023.

The evening was part of Anne Frank Day, with which the city commemorates the Jewish diarist.

Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt on June 12, 1929. In 1934 the Franks fled to the Netherlands. In the exhibition in the Jewish Museum, the roots of the family and their flight are told in a separate room.

Anne Frank's appeals are still valid today

Folman's film deliberately draws a line to the present.

After leaving the museum with the original diary and becoming visible to others, Kitty meets the boy Peter, a loafer with petty criminal energy and a big heart.

Peter steals from tourists to help refugees threatened with deportation.

And Kitty meets the girl Awa, who fled a civil war and is now afraid of having to return to her insecure homeland.

In the final scene of the film, Kitty threatens to burn the famous diary if the state doesn't get involved with those who are being persecuted.

In this way she makes it clear that Anne Frank's appeals to stand by the weak and to fight for the rescue of every individual have lost none of their importance.