03/09/2025 - VENICE 2025: Hagai Levi delivers a poignant and captivating series about the forging of an unusual woman’s psyche and her resilience in the face of hatred

"I still sketched out a prayer around me, like a dark, protective wall. I withdrew inside of it, as if it were a cell within a convent. I built high walls within which I couldn’t fall apart, lose myself or perish. And then I emerged from behind them, stronger and calm." In his loose and modern adaptation of Etty Hillesum’s intimate diaries, written in the Netherlands during the Second World War, Hagai Levi (the well-known creator of series BeTipul, The Affair and Our Boys) brings an exceptional woman to light on screen, who was a writer of rare literary power but, first and foremost, a character who succeeded in taming and transforming her intense inner tumult (anxieties, fears, inhibitions, social maladjustment, depression) into a deeply powerful mental suit of armour which helped her to contend, with unprecedented bravery, with the perils inherent to a country clouded by fascist oppression.

Comprising six episodes (327 minutes in total), the series Etty, which was unveiled out of competition in the 82nd Venice Film Festival, provides a personalised guide on how to find the inner resources to resolve self-destructive psychological conflicts and to take a stand against overwhelming hatred (a generalised climate which is also very current and which Hagai Levi - who hasn’t worked in his homeland, Israel, for ten years - recently denounced in public). It’s a journey of self-discovery which beings with a love story between Etty (a fantastic Julia Windischbauer) - a 27-year-old student and trainee novelist who’s struggling both creatively and psychologically (made worse by an onerous genetic family legacy) - and Doctor Julius Spier (Sebastian Koch), a 55-year-old psychologist and palm reader who left Berlin for Amsterdam two years earlier. But occupying forces are already at work in the Dutch city (curfews, new laws), and measures ostracising Jews and emigrants begin to appear with increasingly dangerous frequency…

Following in Etty’s initially chaotic but increasingly determined wake, cutting through the city on bicycle and on foot, the (brilliantly scripted) story dissects a microcosm which reflects the entire human condition: the rivers which need to be crossed (resisting the temptation to give up on life), emotional skills, the elusive art of letting go, sources of energy, the complex nature of feelings (whether loving, friendly or familial), resilience, independence, detachment, independence of mind, and the choices we have (denial, flight, collaboration, resistance) when faced with obstacles, failures, and the inescapable spiralling of the world when poisonous attitudes run rife. It’s an exploration which goes far beyond universal, ensconced within a wonderful portrait of a woman’s soul (whose visual and musical aspects are equally high quality), to which Hagai Levi lends even more relevance by turning his back on historical reconstruction (without erasing the marks left by Nazi-led persecution) and focusing on the essential within his message: "helping people to better understand ".

Etty was produced by Les Films du Poisson (France), Komplizen Serien (Germany) and Topkapi (Netherlands) in league with Quiddity, in co-production with Arte France and SWR. Studio TF1 are steering world sales.

(Translated from French)