I’LL BE FRANK

Australia, 2023, 54 minutes, Colour.

Voice: John Gaden.

Directed by Aaron Frank.

A personal investigation of ancestry by Australian, Aaron Frank, who features in the film personally, has directed and edited the film.

The Frank of the title is his grandfather who migrated from Germany in 1939, arriving in Australia, settling there and having a fruitful life as the doctor. There are some clips of him at various functions inserted throughout this documentary. However, his grandson, Aaron, has gone to Germany, wanting to find out more about his grandfather, about the situation of Jews in Germany, noting that many Germans who were deprived of their German citizenship between 1939 and 1945 were offered it again. Which means that he also has a German passport – and was questioned on arrival in Germany by the passport officer, asking about his German passport and his speaking German or not.

Aaron is very personable on screen, and very personal, very emotional, sometimes weeping. In the opening of the film, he is going back to the address of his grandfather, the original house bombed, a very modern and comfortable reconstruction adjacent to a park. He also visits the village where his grandfather had originally come from.

He has a manuscript written by his grandfather and reads from it, quotes from it, photos, statistics, information about his grandfather’s father and mother, his uncle who went to Holland, married, but was arrested with wife and son and killed in the concentration camps. He built up quite a picture of life in the 1920s and 1930s as well as moving around Berlin and trying to appreciate what happened during the Nazi era. His very much moved the story, through a phone call from a friend of the family in Holland, who gives him the information about the family’s death. He weeps.

He invites audiences to empathise with him, his pride in his Judaism and his heritage, his search to understand his ancestry, his admiration for his grandfather.

During the final credits there are interviews with Australians with German ancestry, some happy to explore it, others treating their German citizenship with antipathy.