Etty

Etty is the work of Hagai Levi, the Israeli writer-director whose intimate, talk-driven dramas (In Treatment, The Affair and the 2021 HBO remake of Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage) have made him one of television's most distinctive chroniclers of interior life. A co-production between the Netherlands, Germany, France and the UK, backed by ARTE, NPO and SWR, the six-part series had its world premiere out of competition at the 82nd Venice Film Festival in 2025, where all six episodes were screened together.

The series adapts the diaries that Etty Hillesum kept in occupied Amsterdam between 1941 and 1943. The Austrian actress Julia Windischbauer, who learned to speak fluent Dutch in a matter of months for the role, plays Hillesum as she enters therapy with Julius Spier, the German-Jewish émigré played by Sebastian Koch, and begins the relationship that sets off her spiritual transformation. Levi tells the story in a deliberately modern register, giving a wartime interior the immediacy of the present tense, with the diary's first-person voice threaded throughout.

Hillesum's writings, published decades after the war, are among the essential personal testimonies of the period, and they sit alongside Anne Frank's as a record of conscience under catastrophe. Critics were divided on Levi's adaptation. Some found its contemporary framing bracingly alive, others a distraction from the source, but the ambition of dramatising so internal a text, and Windischbauer's central performance, drew consistent praise.