Hagai Levi’s dramatic TV series, Etty, had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Monday.
Six episodes of the series are being screened at the film festival. Levi, who created such series as BeTipul (remade around the world as In Therapy and In Treatment), The Affair, Our Boys, and the remake of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, attended the festive premiere with the stars of the series, Julia Windischbauer and Sebastian Koch, and other cast and crew members.
The series is based on the tragic story but also inspiring story of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jewish woman who sought spiritual enlightenment and kept extensive diaries of great literary merit.
Refusing offers to go into hiding, she worked to help the Jewish community as long as she could and was murdered in Auschwitz at age 29. Her diaries, published nearly 40 years after her death, drew worldwide acclaim and were published in 18 languages.
A love story
In a director’s statement, Levi said that as a former Orthodox Jew feeling spiritually adrift, her diaries were a revelation for him. “Above all, this is a love story: the love of a young woman for a man who awakened her soul, and out of that awakening – a love to life, to God, and to all humankind, in the deepest and highest sense imaginable,” he wrote.
The series is a French, German, and Dutch co-production from Levi and the European channel ARTE. Yaël Fogiel (Les Films du Poisson) is the executive producer, and among the production companies that created it are Komplizen Film (Toni Erdmann), Topkapi Films (Another Round), Quiddity Films (Supernova), and the Israeli global entertainment studio SIPUR (Bad Boy and We Will Dance Again). Emilio Schenker, CEO of SIPUR, accompanied Levi to the festival.