How Do You Market Anne Frank to Gen Z?

That’s the provocative question posed in The Anne Frank Gift Shop, a new short film from writer-director Mickey Rapkin.

Anne Frank is (once again) having a moment, with the debut of the mini-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 neighbour; and, in a recent episode of the raunchy comedy Dave, 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 best-selling 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,  Chris Perfetti and comedian Mary Beth Barone as a stone-faced Gen Z influencer, The Anne Frank Gift Shop provides a poignant metacommentary on our continually robust Anne Frank discourse.

By the end of the filmmaking process, Rapkin said, 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.”

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How Do You Market Anne Frank to Gen Z? (GQ)

Image: Anne Frank tote (Pixels)