Etty – Hagai Levi’s series in theaters and on Arte
Etty by Hagai Levi · Arte · 6 episodes · starring Julia Windischbauer, Sebastian Koch, Leopold Witte, Gijs Naber, Claire Bender, Evgenia Dodina · co-produced by Arte France, SWR, RBB, Les Films du Poisson, Komplizen Serien, Topkapi Series, Quiddity Productions
In cinemas on May 6, 2026 (Part 1 and Part 2) · on arte.tv from May 13 · on Arte on Thursdays, May 21 and 28 at 9 p.m.
A film in six episodes
Hagai Levi first wanted to make a film. Three hours long. Then Etty became six episodes – although he still considers it a film divided into six parts. That distinction says something about what he has done with the diaries of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish woman who died in Auschwitz in November 1943, at the age of 29. A strikingly original cinematic object.
The past brought into the present
Its central formal choice: contemporary Amsterdam. The characters wear jeans. And the buildings are today’s buildings. The Nazi occupation tightens its grip on a city that looks like our own. Levi explains it this way: the people living in Amsterdam in the 1940s were not living in a period film. They were living in their own present. This decision removes from the viewer the comfort of historical distance. What happens on screen cannot be safely confined to the past.
Etty and Julius Spier, a formative encounter
The story begins with the meeting between Etty (Julia Windischbauer) and Julius Spier (Sebastian Koch), a therapist and soon-to-be lover, who encourages her to keep a diary.
This relationship – passionate, unbalanced, formative – triggers a transformation. Spiritual, inner, irreversible. As anti-Jewish laws harden, as Amsterdam closes in, as Auschwitz draws nearer, Etty continues to write. She will voluntarily leave for the Westerbork transit camp in order to accompany the deportees.
An actress inhabited by the role
Julia Windischbauer comes from the theatre. Hagai Levi discovered her while she was launching a crowdfunding campaign for her own film. He says he knew from the audition: there was something of Etty in her.
The actress learned Dutch for four months for the role. What this produces on screen is a charismatic presence, an actress who carries the series from within. Sebastian Koch – The Lives of Others – portrays Spier with all the ambiguity the character requires.
The full cast, Leopold Witte, Gijs Naber, Claire Bender, Evgenia Dodina, is excellent.
A screening that confirms the faithfulness of the adaptation
I saw the entire series at a preview screening, followed by a Q&A with Hagai Levi.
In the audience, her French publisher, who has published Etty Hillesum’s diaries in France for thirty years, stood up to tell him that he had paid tribute to them. That moment said something about the faithfulness of the adaptation, and about what it means to entrust such a work to a filmmaker.
The series has already been screened in Israel, where it reached a very large audience.
A work about inner resistance
Etty is not a film about the Holocaust in the commemorative sense. It is a dive into the inner journey of a woman, how she thinks, how she writes, how she fights against hatred.
The question Hagai Levi asks is universal: how can a person, faced with the rise of hatred, find within herself the resources not to lose herself?
Listen as a complement
I devoted an episode of Falafel Cinéma to Hagai Levi – his career, his series, and what runs through all of his work. Listen to it as a complement.
Listen to the Falafel Cinéma episode
In cinemas on May 6 · on arte.tv from May 13 · on Arte on May 21 and 28
