This film is born out of multiple impulses: my admiration for Lola Lafon and her book ‘Quand tu écouteras cette’ chanson. My joy when she entrusted me with its adaptation. My joy, again, about the creative freedom granted us by France Télévisions and producer Anne Schuchman-Kune. We had carte blanche – an opportunity as rare as it is precious.
Like so many others, reading ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ as a teenager left a profound mark on me. I remembered her irreverence and her lucidity. I had overlooked her talent as a writer.
What have we made of Anne Frank? This is the central question of the book and the film. Anne Frank, ‘this young Jewish girl who no longer exists. The only young Jewish girl who is so beloved.’ What does she tell us about ourselves today? About contemporary antisemitism?
In August 2021, Lola spent a night alone in the Anne Frank House, in the annex where Anne and her family lived in hiding before their deportation. But the film could not be a reconstruction of that solitary night – the annex, rightfully, does not allow filming. So how could we represent absence, evoke ‘what will never be filled’? How does one film emptiness?
Since the journey could not be physical, I imagined it as an internal one.
Lola is a remarkable writer; she is also an exceptional storyteller. Her creative process fascinates me as much as the way her intimate memories intertwine with history. Our night of filming – with cinematographer Alexis Kavyrchine and sound designer Malo Thouément – became a re-reading of her book, punctuated by digressions. Each detour mapped her path through memory and writing. Lola arrived with her laptop, her notebooks, a suitcase filled with things that mattered to her. Of her family’s past, little remains – just a few photographs, a handful of objects. Almost nothing, yet everything.
I wanted to create a space where time folds in on itself – a night in the museum, a night of writing, of re-reading. A night between past and present, where the personal and the universal echo and overlap, where cinematic forms entwine with Lola’s words. The film took shape in the editing room with Muriel Breton: a free dialogue between our footage and personal and historical archives – both realistic and dreamlike – carefully curated by Sharon Hammou and Gianna Franceschini.
There is something cerebral, punk, and poetic about Lola. Free. I wanted a film that reflects her. That resonates also with what we sense of Anne Frank. And so, the ‘irreverence of teenage girls’ lingers in the air. So does the anguish. Ever-present, abstract, and tangible. The sound design by Benoît Gargonne and Oliver Guillaume heightened this immersive, sensory dimension, giving emptiness and emotion a pulse, a texture.
‘Out of this emptiness, something alive must emerge’, Lola told me that night. That is what we tried to do.
Mona Bauer (Achache)
