Twin Sisters (2002 film)

Twin Sisters
Film poster
Directed by	Ben Sombogaart
Written by	Tessa de Loo Marieke van der Pol
Produced by	Hanneke Niens Anton Smit Madelon Veldhuizen
Starring	Thekla Reuten, Nadja Uhl, Ellen Vogel, Gudrun Okras
Music by	Fons Merkies
Distributed by	RCV Entertainment
Release date	2002 (2002)
Running time	137 minutes
Country	Netherlands
Languages	Dutch, German
Box office	$5,145,363

Twin Sisters (Dutch: De Tweeling) is a 2002 Dutch film, directed by Ben Sombogaart, based on the novel The Twins by Tessa de Loo, with a screenplay by Dutch actress and writer Marieke van der Pol.

Plot

The film tells the story of twin German sisters Lottë (Thekla Reuten) and Anna (Nadja Uhl), who are separated when they are six. After the deaths of their parents, they are "divided" between quarreling distant relatives, one being raised in the Netherlands and the other in Germany. Lottë grows up in a loving jewish middle-class intellectual family in Holland and Anna is raised in virtual servitude by a poor Catholic peasant family in a backward area where she is abused by her uncle

The two girls seek to keep in contact, but Anna's family lacks Lottë's address, and Lottë's new family fails to mail her letters for fear that the brutal farmers will claim her as well. The cataclysmic events of World War II sweep them even further apart. Lottë falls in love with a young Jewish man whom the Nazis eventually caught while they were in Amsterdam together and sent to an extermination camp where they killed him. Anna falls in love and marries a young Wehrmacht soldier who joins the Waffen SS and is killed in the last days of the war. Although the girls find each other just before the outbreak of the war, Anna's attempt to reunite with Lottë in its aftermath is thwarted by Lottë's bitter discovery that Anna's husband had been part of Nazism which killed her fiancé in Auschwitz.

Only in her old age, when they meet again at a spa and they reconcile and put aside their divergent lives and reclaim the tender sibling feeling of her childhood. They get lost in a woods and Anna then dies. The two girls/women are each played by three different actors from the Netherlands and Germany.

Cast

• Ellen Vogel - old Lotte
• Gudrun Okras - old Anna
• Thekla Reuten - young Lotte
• Nadja Uhl - young Anna
• Julia Koopmans - little Lotte
• Sina Richardt - little Anna
• Betty Schuurman - the twins' mother
• Jaap Spijkers - the twins' father

Reception

Box office

The film received commercial release on May 6, 2005, and grossed $1,207 in the opening weekend in one theater (US). It went on to gross $1,563 in the US and $5,143,800 in other markets for a worldwide total of $5,145,363.

Critical response

Twin Sisters has an approval rating of 69% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 13 reviews, and an average rating of 6.92/10.

In Israel, some critics objected to the film as "creating a moral equation between the killers and their victims". Still, it was shown successfully for several months in cinemas all over Israel. As the Jewish Chronicle was later to remark,

A thought-provoking film, raises big questions about responsibility for the Holocaust and what ordinary individuals do when faced with extraordinary evil.

Miramax Films had also acquired the United States distribution rights to Twin Sisters and the film was given a limited US theatrical release in 2005.

Awards and nominations

The film was a 76th Academy Awards nominee for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of 2003.

It also won the Golden Calf for Best Feature Film.

See also

• List of Dutch submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
• List of submissions to the 76th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film

External links

• Official website
• Twin Sisters at IMDb
• Movie stills