The era of Holocaust period pieces is over, according to Hagai Levi, director of Scenes From a Marriage and The Affair.
Levi’s new series, Etty, which is based on the diaries of Etty Hillesum, places a modern spin on a Holocaust story by setting it in a “contemporary” Amsterdam, although the show is not rooted in a specific time period.
Audiences will notice immediately that the clothes, buildings and technology seem far beyond what they were in the 1940s (the main character spends much of her time in jeans) and this is exactly the atmosphere Levi was going for.
“The people who lived in Amsterdam in the 1940s didn’t feel like they were in a period film, they lived their lives in modern Amsterdam, and I wanted to show how they experienced that,” Levi told Deadline the day before Etty’s Series Mania special screening. “From the beginning it was clear to me that this shouldn’t be a period piece. The diary is very contemporary. It is the story of a modern young woman living in a big city.”
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Passion project
Etty is Levi’s passion project and he was given permission to briefly pause his overall HBO deal in order to get it over the line. Her diaries are “the book that is near my bed all the time,” Levi explained. They tell the story of a politically-minded Dutch Jewish student who had a chaotic and turbulent youth and started writing a diary in 1941 amid the Holocaust on the advice of her analyst Julius Spier – played in the show by The Lives of Others star Sebastian Koch – who eventually became Hillesum’s lover.
Hillesum’s diaries described her relationship with Spier and religious awakening as the Holocaust worsened. She was eventually deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered.
Adapting Hillesum’s diaries had been on Levi’s mind for 15 years after his therapist recommended the book to him. “It’s hard to say in a few words why it changed my life but it did,” he said. “It gave me a way to live my life, how to raise myself above circumstances and how I can find this kind of autonomy in myself when going through difficult times either personally or politically.”
The project percolated with Levi for years as he gained plaudits, awards and Hollywood recognition for helming shows like The Affair, Scenes From a Marriage and Our Boys. He initially wanted it to be a movie but it morphed into a six-episode TV series and gained new urgency after October 7. At this point, he decided it had to be contemporary. Cameras rolled in The Netherlands a few months after that terrible day in late 2023.
“There were certain Holoacust images that came to life because of the way we experienced October 7,” said Levi. “Families hiding in closets. Scenes that we had learned in school. And after a couple of months the pictures of Gaza also started reminding us of the visuals of the Holocaust. So it felt like time was compressed somehow. The Holocaust is not something that happened in the past, there are aspects of it that are still here.”
Without naming names, Levi criticized some recent Holocaust projects for being “too period, too particular, too obsessed with the idea of showing terrible things happening but without considering how they apply to our own lives.”
He was inspired by Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning 2023 movie The Zone of Interest, which “did such a beautiful job in this new way.”
Although October 7 was a vivid reminder for Levi of the terrors of the Holocaust, he backed Glazer’s famous Oscar speech during which the director said “we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.”
Levi’s desire to make Etty contemporary meant there was plenty work to be done in prepping the look, feel and dialog of his show.
He was extremely selective about costumes and wrote the show in a contemporary language to reflect the modern feel of Hillesum’s writing.
That dialog proved an intriguing challenge for Levi as the show is in German and Dutch, two languages he doesn’t speak. He “wrote in everyday simple English” and used translators, enlisting members of the team who worked on The Zone of Interest (Glazer similarly does not speak German).
“I think you can feel what’s wrong and what’s right when you’re directing,” added Levi. “You learn that it’s not about the language but about the energy.”
That energy was summoned by lead Julia Windischbauer but the Austrian newcomer did in fact spend four months learning Dutch for the role. Levi said Windischbauer’s “inner light and wisdom” meant he knew she was his Etty the moment she auditioned. “You cannot just play Etty, it’s something very very deep that you either have or you don’t.”
Etty airs on French broadcaster Arte and is being sold by Studio TF1. Levi has always viewed it as a cinematic piece and distributors are shopping Etty partly as a theatrical experience. It has already aired in cinemas in Tel Aviv and has Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam shows upcoming. Levi was thrilled with the reaction.
“In my mind this is still more of a film than a TV show,” he said. “People feel it speaks about their own time. It speaks about signs of fascism in [places like] Israel and how a person can cope with that.”
“The industry in Israel is in deep s**t”
Levi hasn’t worked in Israel for a decade, plying his trade mostly in Europe and the U.S., although he was arrested briefly at a protest against Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial reforms several months before October 7.
Now, he fears for the future of the Israeli industry overseen by politicians who want to “control and eliminate art.”
“The industry in Israel is in deep s**t,” he said. “The regime is trying to only give funding to films or TV shows that align with their right-wing ideas. I am trying to help as much as I can but it doesn’t look good and might get worse.”
He also worries about the boycott of “festivals, cinemas, broadcasters and production companies” that are “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people,” which he says is unfairly hurting Israeli creatives who are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
“People need to know that 90% of these creators, directors and writers are fighting againt this regime,” he added. “They are in the streets all day, fighting like hell. They are the last people who deserve to get boycotted. The boycott should be much more selective.”