A new limited series is coming to television that will take viewers back to the days of Anne Frank and some light will focus on a person who appears in Ana Frank’s diary whose story had yet to be told in depth on screen: Miep Gies. The project was more than half a decade in the making before National Geographic premiered, and co-creator/co-showrunner/writer Joan Rater spoke about the six years of research it took to create a series based on Miep Gies. the story and the important purpose of doing so.
Joan Rater (also known for projects such as Grey’s Anatomy and renewed it land of fire ) spoke to Gossipify SCAD TV Festival in Atlanta earlier this year, and spoke about the Miep Gies-centric project, starting with what prompted him to tell the story of the remarkable woman who hid Anne Frank and her family. Shared qualifier:
I’d heard about Miep years ago, and she always caught my attention, because she was the one who found the diary…and she was kind of the diary’s ambassador after Otto Frank’s death, so I knew Miep. But then I went to the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam and a plaque saying Miep was very young caught my eye. She was [Otto Frank’s] secretary, this young secretary, when Otto Frank said, “Will you help me hide my family? I just thought, let’s mythologize Anne Frank and Miep and those people, but Miep was just a girl working for a guy when she said, ‘Do you want to save my life?’ AND [I wanted to tell] this story, with the desire to remove the cobwebs, a sort of historical artifice of the story.
Miep Gies is best known for the way she was portrayed Ana Frank’s diary; National Geographic some light will broaden the scope of her story of a young woman who said yes to a heartbreaking question from her employer. Bel Powley, who is a familiar face to many Apple TV+ subscribers thanks to the morning program, play Miep. Joan Rater continues:
Right [to] talk about people and how you would feel if your boss said to you, “Do you want to hide me, bring me food and medicine for two years?” And Miep immediately said: ‘Yes, of course. I will do it. Anyone would do it”, when the fact is that no one would, because not everyone did. So I wanted to understand why he did it. Who is this woman? Bel Powley plays Miep, and we have this coming-of-age story of a young woman who was helping to hide these people.
Coming-of-age stories don’t always focus on people who not only existed in real life, but had a huge impact on history in ways they couldn’t have known at the time. As Joan Rater pointed out, Miep Gies found Anne Frank’s diary as well as everything she had done to help hide the Frank family. So with the better part of a century between Miep helping the family and Rater deciding to tell the story, as she and co-creator/co-showruner/husband Tony Phelan (also known by potato platter ) Do you fill in the blanks? She explained:
Everything we know about Miep Gies, we know from Anne’s diary. Anne didn’t know everything Miep Gies did because Miep hadn’t told the Franks. Miep was hiding other people in and around Amsterdam with her husband, Jan, while they were hiding the Franks, but they couldn’t share it because the fact that they were hiding other people put the Franks in even more danger. So they went up to the annex, sporting something of a happy face and meanwhile leading a double life. We read everything. We’ve been investigating this for six years. We hired a researcher in Amsterdam to review Miep’s interviews which were only in Dutch and to translate them. We asked her to look into government records and genealogies and eventually found the ancestors of those nurses that Miep and Jan helped hide. We finally managed to talk to them.
Joan Ratter and the some light The team spent a lot of time and effort investigating the story of Miep Gies, which was far more complicated than Anne Frank knew how to record in her diary. She went on to say that they had found more information about Miep’s husband Jan who “was in the Dutch resistance”, and that they had heard of people at Anne Frank’s house rather than at her funeral, “These known boys who had been in the resistance introduced himself The reviewer continued:
He was a man of few words and did not like to talk or draw attention to himself. Even to his children, even to the people who knew him, he didn’t talk about what he had done in the war. It was therefore very difficult for us to find exactly [details], but we could understand. We found examples of things that he did, and then knowing that he was a social worker, we could imagine things that a social worker could help us with. Social workers, in those days, went from house to house to give help, to talk to their clients. So you can imagine someone who can travel all over town, the kind of thing that he could do. Shuttle for money, identity documents. Sometimes we had to use our imaginations, but it was always based on truth.
Certain, some light can only be based on a true story rather than an exact retelling of history, but “based on truth” in which the team that made the show could not find any concrete fact. With the two-episode limited series premiering on National Geographic May 1 after a process that began with six years of research, Rater’s vision is about to hit the small screen. He shared that he actually had a vision for the series during the long research process:
The vision turned out to be exactly what it was, only better because we had these amazing actors. Liev Schreiber, Bel Powley, Joe Cole. We have these incredible actors. Personally, I don’t like historical dramas. I often find myself close at hand, in a way. And I wanted something that I felt able to relate to, [that] I would, I would look. I wanted to kind of remove the historical myths and really feel and relate to these people, if that makes any sense.
Fortunately, while waiting some light (opens in a new tab) In the 2023 TV premiere schedule Is almost finished. The limited series airs Monday, May 1 at 9:00 PM ET with a simulcast on Nation Geographic, Nat Geo WILD, and Lifetime, followed by two episodes airing every Monday at 9:00 PM ET on National Geographic. To see what to expect, watch the trailer:
If you miss the initial airing, the first few episodes will air as an encore on Freeform on Saturday, May 6 at 8 p.m. ET. Additionally, the episodes will be available to stream the following day Disney+ subscribers AND hulu subscribers as well as available on the ABC and Nat Geo TV apps.
Source: Cinemablend
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