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Twin sisters (De tweeling) - Julia Koopmans, Sina Richardt, Jeroen Spitzenberger, Ben Sombogaart

Threat advisory: Elevated - Significant risk of entertaining activities

Movie propaganda

1920s Germany. Two sisters, aged six years, no sooner see their remaining parent buried when they are torn apart. Lotte goes to live with her upper middle class Dutch aunt in Holland, Anna to work as a farm hand on her German uncle's rural farm. The story follows their lives as they try to reconcile their differences while World War II impacts each of them on their lives and finally in old age when they meet again, with the hope that the differences in their youth can finally be reconciled.

Theatrical propaganda posters

Target demographic movie keyword propaganda

Film drama World War II Dutch twin sister German Nazi

Persons of interest

Thekla Reuten .... young Lotte
Nadja Uhl .... young Anna
Julia Koopmans .... young Lotte Bamberg
Sina Richardt .... young Anna Bamberg
Ellen Vogel .... old Lotte
Gudrun Okras .... old Anna
Jeroen Spitzenberger .... David
Roman Knizka .... Martin
Barbara Auer .... Charlotte
Margarita Broich .... Martha
Manfred-Paul Hanig .... Falkenau
Janine Horsburgh .... Frau Grossalie
Ingo Naujoks .... Heinrich
Betty Schuurman .... Mother Rockanje
Hans Somers .... Bram
Jaap Spijkers .... Father Rockanje
Tessa de Loo .... Author
Marieke van der Pol .... Screenwriter
Ben Sombogaart .... Director

Cinematic intelligence sources

Twin sisters (De tweeling) official movie sites:

Author

Twin sisters (De tweeling) QuickTime movie trailers
Awards and film festivals:

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS - Oscars) 2004: Nominated: Best Foreign Language Film (Netherlands)
Camerimage International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography 2003: Won: Silver Frog (Piotr Kukla); Nominated: Golden Frog (Piotr Kukla)
Nederlands Film Festival 2003: Won: Golden Calf: Best Film (Hanneke Niens, Anton Smit); Nominated: Golden Calf: Best Cinematography (Piotr Kukla), Best Director (Ben Sombogaart), Best Screenplay of a Feature Film (Marieke van der Pol), Best Sound Design (Peter Flamman)
Rotterdam International Film Festival 2003: Screening

NB: Dutch and German languages with English language subtitles
See also Black Book (Zwartboek), The elementary particles (Elementarteilchen)
Studios and distributors:

Hopscotch Films

Intelligence analyst

Agent Provocateur Alexander Feld

Theatrical report

In Twin sisters, young Anna and Lotte are identical siblings that get caught up in whirlwinds of history stronger than they are. It is based on the international best-seller The twins by Dutch novelist Tessa De Loo.

Anyone born in Germany around 1920 was destined for the curse of an interesting life. This is multiplied when you are identical twins, separated, violently, by warring rellies at the age of seven because of a parent's death. Anna remains in Germany, sent to a Bavarian pig farm to slave for her abusive uncle and his vile wife; consumptive Lotte is shipped off to Dutch middle-class relatives and given an education.

These radically different rearings take the girls in diverse social and political directions. Erudite Lotte sails, sings Schumann, and marries the Jewish son of family friends; Anna is redeemed from the mud by nuns, finds employment as a maid and becomes the war bride of an quixotic Austrian officer who was drafted into the SS. (Watch for her scene with Nazi officials regarding mental retardation; some great acting from Nadja Uhl.)

The sisters have been kept apart by their adoptive parents for standard parental selfishness; much is made of the unspoken bond linking twins. One suffers, the other one knows it; even if they are in, say, East Prussia and Zeeland. When they finally meet, on the eve of WWII, the bond remains, though they are fundamentally different women. When they are reunited in 1947, the weight of history is too great. Their final meeting is by chance, at a health resort in the late 1990s. Thus the story is told in, you guessed it, flashback.

I'd never heard of the director Ben Sombogaart; a little click over to www.imdb.com reveals why - his work is almost exclusively Dutch television. This may explain a good deal of the "miniseries" look about Twin Sisters, especially those wartime farewells on train platforms! And Sombogaart has managed to include just about every historical, visual and sonic cliché that one can imagine regarding the war: Holland's victimisation, hiding of Jews, drunken German officers, Poles pushed into mud, planes overhead, you name it! And, to reinforce the obvious, he throws in some shockingly sentimental twin-bonding references as well. The cinematography is an essay in the obvious. As for the music... enough said.

That said, Twin sisters is thought-provoking, even if it could have been so at half an hour less! Both sisters lost partners in the war; one to random Allied shelling and the other to the gas chambers. What was the degree of Anna's complicity in Nazi horrors? At what point can the bitter Lotte get over the past? And what, is the status of collective guilt of the German nation, and the victimisation of the Dutch, one human lifespan after May 1945? These are pertinent issues of our day; one would imagine they are fleshed out heartily in the novel. They are only touched on in the movie; wonderfully so with Gudrun Okras, standing out in this excellent cast as the elderly Anna. She has, after all, done nothing wrong. If I was going to get any psycho-historical lesson from this flick, it was from this actress pleading in a Belgian forest. She kept me watching.

As predictable as it may be, down to the clichéd imagery of the twins sleeping together, if a sob does not well up in you as the credits roll, you may have ice in your veins.