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. Austrian actress Julia Windischbauer, who learned to speak Dutch fluently 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 catalyses her spiritual transformation. Levi tells the story through a deliberately modern register, dressing a wartime interior in present-tense immediacy, with the diary's first-person voice threaded throughout.

Hillesum's writings, published decades after the war, are now regarded as one of the essential personal testimonies of the period, set alongside Anne Frank's as a record of conscience under catastrophe. Critical response to Levi's adaptation was divided — some reviewers 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.