The same goes for the Franks celebrating the bombings that rattle their makeshift home, praying for the allies’ arrival. The series also conveys the thirst for shreds of normalcy and moments of lightness amid their confinement and constant fear of exposure, tempered by the pain of those separated from loved ones, especially children.Īmong the more quietly devastating scenes, Miep gifts the wide-eyed young Anne (Billie Boullet) a pair of shoes, proceeding to tell her all the weird and wonderful things that she will do in them as she grows older – a journey, the audience knows, which will never come.

“A Small Light” exhibits considerable restraint in creating that sense of tension mostly without explicit violence, but with the persistent threat of it if their charges are discovered. Margot Frank (Ashley Brooke) and Miep Gies (Bel Powley) in 'A Small Light.' Dusan Martincek/National Geographic for Disney That pays dividends later as the two are tested, separately and together, as they seek to help those displaced and endangered by Nazi atrocities. The format allows the producers (a team led by Tony Phelan and Joan Rater) to take the time to get to know the various players, including Miep and Jan’s sweet, awkward courtship. “What I’m asking you to do is dangerous,” he warns Gies, but she finds the reservoirs of strength to assist them, along with her husband Jan (Joe Cole) and a handful of others, who are dogged by the reality of not knowing who they can trust. She gets hired by Otto Frank (Liev Schreiber, terrific if barely recognizable), a successful businessman preparing to bring his family to Amsterdam to join him.įlash forward to 1940, and the Germans are marching in, eventually leaving Frank, as he puts it, with “nowhere to go,” except the annex space above the office, where his family and four others would spend more than two years. The story opens with Gies (Bel Powley) desperately needing a job to avoid having her adopted family try to marry her off to her (secretly gay) brother.

Slow starting at eight parts, the National Geographic/Disney+ miniseries builds steadily, in a fashion that’s ultimately both stirring and heartbreaking. The greatest heroism often resides in the actions of ordinary people in extraordinary situations and times, and so it is with “A Small Light,” which tells the story of Anne Frank through the eyes of Miep Gies, the woman who helped hide her and her family.

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