A new limited series is coming to television that will take viewers back to the era of Anne Frank, and A Small Light will focus on a person featured in The Diary of Anne Frank whose story had yet to be told in-depth on screen: Miep Gies. The project was in the works for more than half a decade before the premiere on National Geographic, and co-creator/co-showrunner/writer Joan Rater opened up about the six years of research that went into crafting a series based on Miep Gies’ story and the important goal for doing so.
Joan Rater (also known for projects including Grey’s Anatomy and the renewed Fire Country) spoke with CinemaBlend at SCAD TVfest in Atlanta earlier this year, and she discussed the project centered on Miep Gies, starting with what made her want to tell the story of the remarkable woman who hid Anne Frank and her family. Rater shared:
I had heard about Miep years ago, and I was always struck by her, because she was the person who found the diary… and was sort of the ambassador of the diary after Otto Frank died, so I knew of Miep. But then I went to the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam, and a plaque caught my eye, which was that Miep was very young. She was [Otto Frank’s] secretary, this young secretary, when Otto Frank said, ‘Will you help hide my family?’ I just thought, we mythologize Anne Frank and Miep and these people, but Miep was just a girl working for a guy when he said, ‘Will you save my life?’ And [I wanted to tell] that story, with the desire to take the cobwebs, the historical sort of artifice off the story.
Miep Gies is primarily known for how she was portrayed in The Diary of Anne Frank; National Geographic’s A Small Light will expand the scope of her story as the young woman who said yes to a life-changing question from her employer. Bel Powley, who is a familiar face for many Apple TV+ subscribers thanks to The Morning Show, plays Miep. Joan Rater went on:
Just [to] talk about the people and what that would feel like if your boss said, ‘Would you hide me, bring food and medicine for two years?’ And Miep right away said ‘Yes, of course. I’ll do it. Anyone would do it,’ when the fact is not anyone would, because not everyone did. So I wanted to understand why she did. Who is this woman? Bel Powley plays Miep, and we get this coming-of-age story of a young woman who was helping to hide these people.
Coming-of-age stories don’t always center on individuals who not only existed in real life, but had a huge impact on history in a way that they couldn’t have known at the time. As Joan Rater noted, Miep Gies found Anne Frank’s diary on top of everything she’d done to help hide the Frank family. So, with the better part of a century having passed between when Miep helped the family and when Rater decided to tell the story, how did she and co-creator/co-showruner/husband Tony Phelan (also known for Council of Dads) fill in the blanks? She explained:
Everything we know about Miep Gies, we know from Anne’s diary. Anne didn’t know everything that MIep Gies was doing because Miep didn’t tell the Franks. Miep was hiding other people in and around Amsterdam with her husband, Jan, while they were hiding the Franks, but they couldn’t share that because the fact that they were hiding others put the Franks even in more danger. So they were going up to the annex, sort of putting on a happy face, and meanwhile living a double life. We read everything. We’ve researched this for six years. We hired a researcher in Amsterdam to go through Miep’s interviews that were only in Dutch and translate them. We had her look at government records and genealogies and we ended up finding the ancestors of these nurses that Miep and Jan helped hide. We ended up being able to talk to them.
Joan Rater and the A Small Light team put in a lot of time and effort to research Miep Gies’ story, which was far more complicated than Anne Frank knew to record in her diary. She went on to share that they found more information about Miep’s husband Jan, who “was in the Dutch resistance,” and they learned from people at the Anne Frank house that at his funeral, “these well-known guys who had been in the resistance showed up.’ Rater continued:
He was a man of few words and didn’t like to talk about or bring any attention to himself. Even to his children, even to people who knew him, he wouldn’t talk about what he did during the war. So it was very difficult for us to find exact [details], but we were able to understand. We found some instances of things he did, and then knowing that he was a social worker, we were able to imagine things that a social worker would be able to help do. Social workers, at that time, went from house to house to give aid, to talk to their clients. So you can imagine that somebody who’s able to travel all around town, the kinds of things they could do. Shuttle money, IDs. We had to sometimes use our imagination, but it was always based in truth.
Of course, A Small Light can only be based on a true story rather than an exact retelling of history, but “based in truth” where the team who made the show could not find precise facts. With the limited series premiering with two episodes on National Geographic on May 1 after a process that began with six years of research, Rater’s vision is on the verge of airing on the small screen. She shared that she actually had a vision for the series during the long research process:
The vision turned out to be exactly what it was, but better because we have these incredible actors. Liev Schreiber, Bel Powley, Joe Cole. We have these amazing actors. I don’t like historical drama, personally. I find, often, I am at arm’s length, somehow. And I wanted something that I would feel I could relate to, [that] I would like, I would watch. I wanted the sort of historical myths to be wiped away, and to really feel and relate to these people, if that makes sense.
Fortunately, the wait for A Small Light (opens in new tab) in the 2023 TV premiere schedule is nearly over. The limited series will debut on Monday, May 1 at 9 p.m. ET with a simulcast across Nation Geographic, Nat Geo WILD, and Lifetime, followed by two episodes debuting every Monday at 9 p.m. ET on National Geographic. For a look at what to expect, check out the trailer:
In case you miss the initial broadcast, the premiere episodes will air as an encore on Freeform on Saturday, May 6 at 8 p.m. ET. Plus, episodes will be available to stream next day for Disney+ subscribers and Hulu subscribers, as well as available on the ABC and Nat Geo TV apps.