Controversial documentary takes a fresh look at the tragic Jewish girl whose

DOCUMENTARIES should be like feature films. They might be based on fact, but that is no excuse for not creating dramatic heights of tension, mixed between gentler slopes of plot development.

This at least is the belief of documentary film-maker Jon Blair, and he won an Oscar for his work.

His 1996 Academy award-winning film about Anne Frank, the 13-year-old Jewish girl who wrote a diary as she and her family hid from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic, will be shown tonight as part of the European Film Festival.

Anne Frank Remembers might have been his Oscar winner, but, as Blair explained, he had never really wanted to make the documentary at all. 'In 1983 I made a film about Oskar Schindler, which had a certain notoriety, but was put on the shelf for 10 years until [Steven] Spielberg's film [Schindler's List] came out.' Blair's documentary was re-released, and soon afterwards Gillian Warnes of the Anne Frank Educational Trust in London contacted him, asking if he was interested in making a film.

'I absolutely didn't want to do it. Firstly I'd always said I wouldn't make another Holocaust film. But also because Anne Frank is so famous, such an icon, I couldn't see what would be fresh.' But Ms Warnes told him it had never been done: people had taken the diary as a starting point but no one had done a full biographical film. 'I didn't believe her. But she did a filmography and she was right. And at that point of course it was irresistible.' At the beginning he was struggling for funding, and at the point where he had given up the idea of making the film, it was Spielberg who stepped in personally with the cash.

Blair describes Anne Frank Remembers as having 'a typical play structure: three acts and an epilogue' and emphasised how documentaries have to tell their stories with the same sense of drama as any other type of film.

Part of the dramatic tension stems from how Blair realised he did not really like this selfish, strong-headed young teenager - 'I think if we had met, we wouldn't have got on at all' - and found his challenge was to debunk the myth of Frank's saintliness, while emphasising the emblematic tragedy of her story.