Tony Phelan and Joan Rater (‘A Small Light’): ‘They couldn’t believe in their modern world that Hitler was allowed to flourish’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
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Joan Rater wasn’t interested in making another Holocaust project about Anne Frank, in part because the story had been told so often and so well but also because she always felt personally distanced from historical pieces. But after Rater and husband Tony Phelan visited the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam, they were inspired to want to tell the story of the woman who hid Anne and her extended Jewish family from the Nazis in the Netherlands in the early 1940s. “But if we were going to do this, I needed it to feel modern and relatable,” she says. “I needed it to feel like something I’d get into.” The result was “A Small Light,” a Nat Geo eight-part limited series that Rater and Phelan served on as creators, showrunners, co-writers and executive producers. It has attracted consistently stellar reviews while dramatizing the courage of a Dutch woman named Miep Gies who risked her life to shelter the Franks. See the exclusive video interview above.
What turned out to be fortuitous for Rater and Phelan was that Gies was every ounce a contemporary woman despite having lived during World War II (and beyond). “The thing that really struck us as we started to dive into Miep’s life and her personality was just how modern to us she felt,” stresses Phelan. “She was a real firecracker, a 4-foot-11 powerhouse, and everyone that knew her – both in her later life and at that time – said as much. And we had this desire to kind of clear the cobwebs off this story. The other thing you’re dealing with is, it’s a story that most people think they know. And so how do you bring a freshness to it and show people this whole other side of the story that they don’t know as a way of illuminating those characters from Anne’s diary?”
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One way they’re illuminated is through some shrewd casting. Bel Powley and Joe Cole portray Gies and her husband, Jan, both of whom were caught up in the Dutch Resistance at that time. Rater credits chemistry between Powley and Cole “that’s off the charts. Bel and Joe are also just delightful people to spend time with. We root for their relationship (in the series) because it’s so clear they love each other. We’re never worried that their marriage is going to fall apart.”
Rater and Phelan knew that they’d captured lightning in a bottle with their lead couple from the get-go. What they didn’t know when they started diving into the project was was that Miep and Jan were hiding other Jews around Amsterdam in addition to the Franks. “But they couldn’t tell one another about that because it would have put them in danger,” Rater points out. “If Miep and Jan get caught, the jig is up. So we were like, my God, they were leading this double life. We’ve always known about learning this incredible coming-of-age story in Anne’s diary. But then on the other side of the bookcase is another coming-of-age story. And that’s the one we tell in ‘A Small Light’.”
Alas, the filmmakers couldn’t have envisioned that the world they depict with such modernity in the series would bear such frightful parallels to the world today, what with the rise of ant-Semitism along with the toxic spread of racism and fascism. “It’s truly shocking, it’s devastating, it’s heartbreaking on all levels,” Rater says. “The Franks and Miep and all of the people in the Secret Annex couldn’t believe in their modern world that Hitler was allowed to flourish and anti-Semitism to thrive, that hatred was normalized.” Adds Phelan: “We always assumed that the world had learned the lesson and we just had to keep reminding people what had happened.”
Phelan admits that he tends to be cynical in his outlook on life, but wishes that people will take away hopeful meaning from watching “A Small Light.” “Miep’s whole message was that anybody can make a difference,” he says, “and that it can be in very small ways. That you don’t have to carry a banner or a gun. Simple acts of kindness can do amazing things and also can give you the hope to persevere through dark times.”
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