Twin Sisters 2002

This Dutch Oscar nominee is a lavish and absorbing 20th-century historical drama based on the Dutch bestseller by Tessa de Loo that has been read by more than 3.5 million people in Holland and Germany. Anna and Lotte are twins, cruelly separated in early childhood. Anna grows up in a tough farming household in Germany, while Lotte lives a privileged middle-class life in the Netherlands. As the Nazis rise to domination in Europe, the sisters find themselves affiliated, inextricably, to opposite sides.

“Twin Sisters has the engrossing quality of a big historical novel and about the same level of sentimental artistry… The most notable aspect of the film is its timely entry into the current debate about whether the German people were also victims of Nazism. The film takes the outspoken view that they were, illustrating it very convincingly with the story of its two attractive young twins, one ending up in Hitler’s Germany and the other sheltering a Jewish family in occupied Holland.” — Deborah Young, Variety