Anne Frank is (once again) having a moment, with the debut of the Hulu series A Small Light, about the Dutch friends who tried to save the Frank family; My Friend Anne Frank, a new memoir from Anne’s childhood neighbor; and, in a recent episode of the raunchy comedy Dave (also on Hulu), a hallucinatory sequence featuring the show’s star encountering the teenage diarist, the most famous victim of Hitler’s genocidal regime.
If you think Anne being portrayed on a sitcom—or simply being described as “having a moment”—is shocking or inappropriate, the writer and filmmaker Mickey Rapkin wants you to reexamine your reaction. In his directorial debut, a short film called The Anne Frank Gift Shop, a group of characters attend a pitch meeting for the Anne Frank House in which they discuss how to get Anne’s story through to the youth of today. They debate, hilariously, whether to market Anne’s memory via a true crime podcast, TikTok, an instagram cat, or even a Holocaust survivor hanging out in the gift shop. People always say she’s got this bestselling book, one character notes, but she’d probably rather be alive.
Featuring darkly funny and ultimately moving turns by a strong cast including Ari Graynor and Chris Perfetti and comedian Mary Beth Barone as a stone-faced Gen Z influencer, The Anne Frank Gift Shop provides a poignant meta-commentary on our continually robust Anne Frank discourse. It’s a film that, per Sarah Paulson on Instagram, “makes you laugh your face off AND FEEL things.”
By the end of the filmmaking process, Rapkin told GQ on the phone, he had a new attitude towards Anne Frank as a symbol of the lives destroyed by the Nazis. “Put her face on everything, on a mug, a tote bag,” he said. “I don’t care as long as people continue to tell the story.”
Mickey Rapkin: The title came to me years ago, actually, when I went to visit the Anne Frank House. I had this emotional experience, this reverence. I’m alone, quiet, I don’t want to make a sound. And then it’s like, exit through the gift shop. It’s jarring.
Right. It’s Amsterdam, so someone is like, Come here and buy a waffle and have french fries. Anyway, for years since then, I’ve had this title in mind. And then this Jewish organization called Reboot launched Reboot Studios to produce interesting, irreverent, thoughtful Jewish projects and I just started noodling on it.
Exactly. I’m going to Venice, Italy next week, and I have only a day and a half, but I have to stop in the Jewish Ghetto. It’s just in your DNA.
And now we’re in a weird moment in time where antisemitism is on the rise, fascism is on the rise. There was this study from the Claims Conference, the first full 50-state study on Holocaust knowledge of American Millennials and Generation Z, [and] The results were that two-thirds of young adults can’t tell you that six million jews were murdered in the Holocaust. And 11 percent who responded thought Jews caused the Holocaust!
There were international headlines—the Guardian said it showed shocking levels of ignorance. I started to think—how do you talk to young people? What’s the comedic voice that would Trojan Horse this generation into thinking about these things?
I started with who would be in this room. I wanted the comedy to come from a language that people would understand, that they were used to seeing on a show like Succession: a boardroom meeting, or people you’d know in the office. Yes, that one has a crush on this one, they would be hungover, and they would bring in an influencer. I wanted their opinions to change over the course of the meeting, and have them present ideas that people might actually suggest.
Everyone in the film knows something about Anne. For many people, for better or worse, she’s the way into the Holocaust. She was young, she was hopeful—she makes you think, that could have been you, your sister, your neighbor. She is a symbol, because she is only one story. And there are six million stories just like hers, and like the character Ben says in the film, if people knew the story of every single Anne Frank, their heads would explode.
“One of the many questions that have often bothered me is why women have been, and still are, thought to be so inferior to men.” Anne wrote that on June 13, 1944. She was so ahead of her time. She was also funny. She wrote, “Sometimes I think my face is going to sag with all this sorrow, my mouth is going to droop at all the corners.” I feel like that’s a Lena Dunham line.
One of the many depressing, horrible things about this story is … she was three years younger than Mel Brooks. Mel Brooks is still making comedy, he’s still relevant. She could have been here, now. Her childhood friend just had a book published.
There’s this idea that young people have access to too much tragedy. They have their phones and they’re constantly being bombarded with horrible things happening in the world. Scientists legitimately have a name for this phenomenon—empathy fatigue—that organizations have to deal with.
We have a whole bit in the film about TikTok. Actually, the Anne Frank House is on TikTok. The content is educational, not people doing a dance in front of the Secret Annex but they are there—they have to go where young people are.
And a couple of years ago we had Taika Watiti’s JoJo Rabbit, this movie about a German boy whose imaginary friend is Hitler. You can’t get much darker than that. He won an Oscar. It showed how you can take a sacred subject and treat it with humor.
In that episode of Dave, there’s a rumor that Little Dicky is dead. His manager is psyched because of the publicity. He hides in this hotel room, and compares himself to Anne Frank, and ends up hallucinating that he’s talking to Anne. He reveals to her that her diary became a global hit, and she freaks out because the world knows her innermost thoughts. And Dave is trying to reassure her: No one came out of the Holocaust looking better than you.
It was really funny but also not historically accurate. Anne wanted her book to be published. In March 1994 she heard this radio broadcast where a member of the Dutch government in exile said they wanted records of the Dutch experience under occupation. So Anne started to edit her diary for publication.
As I was writing these bad jokes, I was like Is that too much? One of the producers, her name is Jane Sinisi, she’s the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. I sent it to her and I was like, this is the moment of truth. I was so relieved when she called to say she thought it was funny and a story that needs to be told.
Because often, real life is way more absurd than whatever jokes you come up with. Like, they did a public contest to name a new train in Germany. The winner of the contest was Anne Frank. And then people said, no, no, we can’t have a train named Anne Frank. Trains took Jews to the death camps.
Recently, Rolling Stone examined strange TikTok fan videos about Anne. And there’s actually Yelp reviews of the Anne Frank house. Really. 665 people decided, the world needs to hear my opinion of the Anne Frank house.
Whatever I can come up with, there’s something more offensive out there. Umbro named a pair of shoes the Zyklon which is the gas that was used in the chambers. That’s offensive, so if you want to be offended at my jokes, that’s fine.
Ben is played by Chris Perfetti, who is so great every week in Abbot Elementary. I was so lucky to have him in the movie. This character is sort of like me. I had a great relationship with my dad, but when he died I found a Jewish book of questions, with a post-it note on the page about Jews and homosexuality. He was nothing but supportive of my being gay. But apparently at some point he wanted to know what Jewish scholars thought, so he went to a bookstore to buy this book.
We all see ourselves in the Anne Frank story in different ways. Ben explains that his mom died and his dad keeps calling and it’s driving him insane. He’s in this meeting, and his dad keeps calling. During the meeting, Ben explodes and reveals a fact about Anne, that her father read her diary and said he really didn’t know anything about her. At the end, Ben’s dad calls and he abruptly leaves the meeting to answer. Because you have to connect with people while you have the chance. It’s a trite thing to say, but it’s true.
We have this festival run this summer, and I hope in a perfect world, someone buys it, because I want it to be seen. I want people to leave and talk about it. The jokes will not be for everybody, but even that will spark conversation.
The Anne Frank Giftshop is streaming this summer at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and LA Shorts.