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A Small Light | In Production Piece | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Man: --take one.
Director: Ready? And, action.

Susanna Fogel: People tend to think that they know history, especially with very famous stories like Anne Frank's story. But with Miep, you're coming at it from a sideways angle that forces you to see it from a different lens.

Joan Rater: Miep Gies was Otto Frank's secretary at the company he started in Amsterdam after he fled Germany. Miep was a young girl in her 20s when he asked her to hide his family. You to take your time to think it through.

No, I don't. What do I do? We wanted to tell the story of the ordinary people who did these extraordinary things. These incredibly banal issues that come up just in the life of being a young woman are juxtaposed with these really high stakes.

What would you have me do when Mr. Frank asked? Say no? Ask me. I didn't think I had to consult you before deciding to save a person's life. It was really important for us to make this story feel modern and relevant to sort of wipe the cobwebs off it.

What you've got to remember is that even though these big historical moments were going on, Miep's marriage problems weren't going to wait until the war was over. Experiencing growing from a girl to a woman wasn't going to wait until the war was over.

Know what your problem is? You don't have a sense of humor. Because what I just said was really funny. Tony and Joan have really captured that brilliantly, the humanity of the situation, the realness of what these people were actually going through.

You look so beautiful, and Jan looks so handsome. Why are you being so sappy all of a sudden? It's not told through a documentary point of view. Margot might be older, but I am more emotionally sophisticated.

Anne's story is definitely relevant today, because racism and anti-Semitism is still happening in this world. Different format, but it's still happening.

Director: Background

Liev Schreiber: It just felt like the right story at the right time.

Director: Liev, come out. To have a story that speaks so profoundly about compassion, the similarities with what it was like to be a young person back then and what it is like to be a young person now.

So you couldn't keep your mouth shut once? I'm the Crown Princess of not being able to keep her mouth shut. We shot outside the Frank apartment, and I took that opportunity to just say let's all just take a minute to recognize the task ahead of us, how we can honor those people who sacrificed themselves.

If we turn away someone we know we can help, we become people we don't recognize and we don't exist anymore. It's a great mission of the show to kind of make people look around them and look at their own world differently.

Man: Miep's message was always, I am not special. You can do this as well. Anybody has it within them to do this, to make a difference in someone's life.

Man: Ow. [Gunshot]

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