The writer and director of The Anne Frank Gift Shop on using humour to process horror 

Audience Award winner for Best Short at last month’s Hong Kong Jewish Film Festival, The Anne Frank Gift Shop is not your typical take on the Holocaust. Writer and director Mickey Rapkin talks to Jaz Kong about using humour to process horror 

“The holocaust” and “humour” are not terms one would expect to find in the same sentence, let alone the description of a popular film. But, as Mickey Rapkin says, “We’re living in strange times. Anti-Semitic incidents are on the rise. The Anne Frank Gift Shop takes aim at a very real problem – a generation with little awareness of the Holocaust – and attempts to solve it with humour by meeting this audience where they live.” 

The Anne Frank Gift Shop, which won the Audience Award for Best Short after its screening at the 25th Hong Kong Jewish Film Festival in November, is a 15-minute short film that imagines a meeting between The Anne Frank House and the New York design firm they’ve hired to renovate their gift shop to appeal to young people. Its mockumentary style is reminiscent of The Office or Parks and Recreation, as are the dynamics between the characters – including representatives from the museum, creative brains from the ad agency and a young influencer who is mocked early on in the film for her comment after visiting The Anne Frank House that “the attic was big”. 

Rapkin, who wrote and directed The Anne Frank Gift Shop as well as wrote the book that inspired the film series Pitch Perfect, says the project grew out of a sense of real concern. “A landmark 2020 study – the US Millennial Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey interviewing adults aged 18-39, also known as Millennials and Gen Z, across 50 states in the US, and later on, other parts of the world as well – by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany revealed that a majority of young Americans did not know basic facts about the Holocaust,” he says. “Two-thirds of those surveyed could not tell you that six million Jews were murdered; 11% somehow believe Jews ‘caused’ it.” 

“How was that message getting lost?” Rapkin wondered. “This isn’t ancient history. If Anne Frank were alive today, she’d be three years younger than Mel Brooks. And he’s still working as a comedian. Anne Frank could have watched The Wizard of Oz on her 11th birthday. And we’re still watching that movie and talking about her ruby slippers.” 

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Jane Sinisi, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, produced The Anne Frank Gift Shop along with Reboot Studios. “She was the first person to tell me it was okay to put an escape-room joke in a movie about Anne Frank,” Rapkin says. “How else do we process horror? She understood that this film aims to meet Gen Z where they live, disarming them with a comedic language they speak before hitting them with the project’s essential appeal.” 

Just as you’d expect of a real meeting at a creative agency, wild suggestions fly – like Anne Frank or her cat, Moortje, having accounts on TikTok (the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum, it should be noted, does have accounts on various social media channels) or selling books at the gift shop about other feminist “icons” such as Katniss Everdeen. All jokes aside, The Anne Frank Gift Shop helps audiences have a better understanding of how difficult it is to revitalise history. 

“Anne Frank is a feminist icon. She was also a real person. She was a young girl who was forced to hide in an attic for two years because she was Jewish. And she died at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. She was 15,” Rapkin says. “But I think humour shakes things up for viewers. What we’re trying to do is get young people to pay attention.” 

Anne Frank and The Anne Frank Gift Shop are comparable in a way that they serve as a baby step into a bigger world and perhaps an easier way to learn about a difficult period of history. As mentioned in the film, Anne Frank is essentially a brand and The Diary of a Young Girl is the best-selling book of all time behind the Bible. Even the Holocaust is a brand, Rapkin points out. “It wasn’t even called the Holocaust until the 1960s. And even then, the name wasn’t really popularised until a miniseries called Holocaust. 

“I don’t think we’re commercialising history. Anne Frank is historically a way for young people to talk about the Holocaust, because they identify with her. But as we say in the film, she is just one of six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. If you knew the story of every Anne Frank, your head would explode.” 

Rapkin still remembers his first visit to The Anne Frank House some 20 years ago, before the gift shop was relocated across the street. “When I visited, you exited through the gift shop,” he says. “[In 2020], the café at The Anne Frank House was renovated. 

The architect gave an interview and talked about how much care went into designing the café. Visitors often have such an intense, emotional reaction to the house that the café provides a buffer between the house and the real world. 

“One might think it’s strange to have a café at The Anne Frank House. But I absolutely understand and appreciate that need for a space to sit and reflect before emerging into the crowded Amsterdam streets,” Rapkin says, before reflecting on what it meant for him as a Jewish person to visit the house. “It was devastating. As you might expect, I had a very emotional reaction. You’re walking through sacred ground. It was very quiet, everyone was very respectful of the history. This was before smartphones. Maybe it’s different now. But that’s how I remember it. Everyone in the space could feel the weight of history.” 

Smartphones, in fact, may be one reason why young people today are tuning out when it comes to this painful experience. “It’s hard to be a young person today,” Rapkin explains. “As we say in the film, they have access to tragedy in their pockets 24 hours a day.” The film’s influencer character, Madison, played by Mary Beth Barone, calls it “empathy fatigue” – otherwise known as the negative result of repeated exposure to stressful or traumatic events. 

Nevertheless, the Claims Conference survey did provide one ray of hope in that 80% of respondents believe that it’s important to continue teaching about the Holocaust, in part so that it doesn’t happen again. And as the museum representative Ilse, played by Kate Burton, says in The Anne Frank Gift Shop, doing something is still better than nothing. “I don’t know how to reach young people. But the cost of doing nothing? That I do know. We have to tell this story again and again and again. Every which way. Or it will happen again.” 

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