“It’s not a show about the Holocaust,” insists Hagai Levi, the creator of Etty which world premieres out of competition at the Venice Film Festival – even though the six-part series is set in Amsterdam between 1941-1943 during the Nazi occupation and its real-life titular heroine died in Auschwitz.
Shot in Dutch and German, the loose adaptation of the diaries of Dutch author Etty Hillesum chronicles the 27-year-old’s spiritual awakening during the German occupation before her deportation and death. Her diaries were published 40 years later and have been translated into more than 20 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide.
Julia Windischbauer stars as Etty and Sebastian Koch as therapist Julius Spier, with whom she has a passionate love affair that sparks her transformation.
“The series – like the book – takes the bigger, more universal lessons from the Holocaust that goes beyond the circumstances tied to a specific time and place in history,” suggests the Israeli-born Levi, creator of The Affair and more recently Scenes From A Marriage which also had its world premiere at Venice Film Festival in 2021 before airing on HBO. HBO was also home to his series Our Boys and the US adaptation of In Treatment which he produced and co-directed based on his own Israeli hit show BeTipul.
Etty is produced by France’s Les Films du Poisson with Germany’s Komplizen Serien and the Netherlands’ Topkapi Series, in co-production with Arte France and Italy’s Quiddity. Studio TF1 handles sales.
Reteaming with Arte France and Les Films du Poisson, his partners on the French In Treatment, the project was greenlit for production in early 2023. Then, Levi says, “After October 7, everything changed.”
The project was originally meant to be a feature film, but ended up shifting to a miniseries format or, as Levi suggests, “a very long film divided into six episodes.” He adds: “She died in Auschwitz, so there can’t be another season.”
A contemporary look
Etty shot from September through December of 2024 at many of the real locations from the book including Hillesum’s real-life apartment building and places where the Gestapo had been stationed. However, the costumes and décor are not period-specific.
Levi says he made a “deliberate decision to make the series contemporary. I didn’t want it to be a period piece and create a distance between today’s audiences and what they see on screen. Audiences are so used to looking at fictional characters or real figures from this time period in black and white, but in fact Etty was just like us – complicated with contemporary problems. I did everything to make it feel like we’re watching an urban person in a modern place who encountered something incredible.”
While Levi is behind several ambitious series, he says, “This is the biggest production I’ve ever done in terms of scale. This series would have cost $100m in America.” Instead, it shot for around €11m.
“It was such a pleasure to work in Europe with public money,” he says of funding from TV networks Arte in France, SWR in Germany and NPO in the Netherlands. “All of the pressure you have in America isn’t there – you can make pure art, people are expecting you to do that. Taking a Hollywood approach would have been a shame. American productions in Europe speaking English about World War Two – at a certain point they stop being useful, with everyone speaking in ridiculous accents and telling the same story over and over again. We need a new, more contemporary language to speak about the Holocaust today.”
Legacy of October 7
Revisiting the book and then shooting the series after October 7 made it all the more relevant for its creator who is currently living in Tel Aviv.
“Israel is full of hatred – from both sides, all sides. You get up in the morning and you hate. For me, making Etty was an escape from hate,” Levi explains. “Etty is a life-changing person, anyone can identify with her in any challenging situation. It’s about a person who found strength inside in a very difficult time and remained a human being, a soulful person and didn’t succumb to hate or to fear.”
While he has been working outside of Israel for more than a decade, Levi still has close ties with the local industry and suggests, “There is a reason that the work of Israeli creators encounters protest abroad, and we cannot ignore this reason. A couple of years ago, when Russia was banned around the world, we felt it was justified, so we cannot say that now because it’s us, it’s not justified.”
He says he hopes the series’ protagonist will serve as a lesson in “rejecting hate of any kind,” particularly within the increasingly tense geopolitical context.
“It’s hard, it’s demoralising, and there is a strong sense of helplessness, but we need to have hope. Etty is helping me with this, and I hope through this series she can help other people too.”
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