Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Bel Powley, Joe Cole, Live Schreiber, Billie Boullet, Ashley Brooke, Amira Casar, Ian McElhinney, Sally Messham, Andy Nyman, Nichlas Burns, Rudi Goodman, Caroline Katz, Liza Sadovy, Laurie Kynaston, Noah Taylor, Sebastian Armesto, Bill Milner, Sean Hart, Hanna Van Vliet, Eleanor Tomlinson, Jim High, Cosima Shaw, Tom Stourton, Daniel Donskoy, Dylan Edwards, Sarah T. Cohen, Vicki Pepperdine, Victor McGuire, Jeff Rawle.
To feel outrage and grief in the same moment is to honour those who have fallen at the hands of tyranny, for how else can we fight back against a system, except show open contempt to those that follow the machinations and decrees of mad and evil men but by opening a window of resistance to their bigotry, prejudice, and wickedness.
We get told to forgive and forget, we should but only in minute measures to the former, and never to the latter, especially when it comes to the crimes of those who strutted underneath the Nazi flag, who wilfully followed orders to systematically hunt down and murder anything they felt was not of the symbol of their race. For that small light that offers hope to the oppressed, must also be seen as a sign to those who would hate that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, that we must be as brave as those who guard A Small Light with ferocity and sacrifice if needed.
The eight-part series, A Small Light, brings the life of those who heroically stood up against Fascism as The Netherlands was placed under the control of Hitler’s army, and the dedication of Miep and Jan Gies as they sought to protect the Frank family and their friends, but also by standing firm against oppression in the face of starvation and the possibility of reprisals in the form of torture and death.
What is so revealing as A Small Light progresses is perhaps just how much we may have forgotten about the sacrifice of the Dutch people as they held firm, and whilst we rightly consider Anne Frank to be a teenage heroine and writer of repute, we must also acknowledge the heroism of women like Miep Gies who gave everything to save as many Jewish people in Amsterdam, for we cannot have one without the other, for every Anne who writes, there is a Miep who does.
The series is brutal but with the rays of sunshine that we must feel in which hope survives, and as Miep and Jan Gies’ life takes on the unforgiven road, so the audience learns more of how resistance is not a grand gesture, but a series of small victories peppered with the often-fruitless feeling that comes from stagnation, the sense that at any moment the senses will be ever on alert in case someone, a friend, a neighbour, a loved one, cracks and lets slip the largest secret in your life.
To carry the intensity and sheer fear of the period, to enlarge the story of Anne Frank and show the truth beyond the stifling shelter that the families crowded into, takes courage as well, it takes fortitude to let the feelings take hold, and for Bel Powley as Miep Gies, Joe Cole as her husband Jan, and especially Liev Schreiber in arguably his finest and most sympathetic role to date as the patriarch of the Frank family, and sole survivor of the group, Otto, this, like the disturbing film Conspiracy, should be pre-requisite watching for all who wish to keep an eye on an evil that never sleeps, to be charged with keeping a small light focused on the dangers of Fascism and to be alert when danger rears its serpent like head again.
A series that frames the terror on the European continent through the eyes of those willing to sacrifice themselves in the name of humanity, a series of depth and belief.
Ian D. Hall