Twin Sisters

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.

The film tells the story of twin German sisters Lotte (Thekla Reuten) and Anna (Nadja Uhl), separated at a young age. After the death of their parents, they are "divided" between quarreling distant relatives, one being raised in the Netherlands and the other in Germany. As well as a national difference, they also undergo a sharp class differentiation. Lotte is raised by a rather affluent, middle-class intellectual family in Amsterdam, and Anna by a poor Catholic peasant family in a backward area, where in the 1930s the Nazi Party seems to offer young people the only chance of social mobility.

During their teens the two girls seek to keep in contact, despite numerous and mounting obstacles. But the cataclysmic events of World War II and the Holocaust sweep them in opposite directions. Lotte becomes involved in the Dutch resistance and the hiding of endangered Jews, and falls in love with one of them - who is eventually caught by the Nazis and sent to his death. Anna falls in love and marries a young Wehrmacht soldier who is eventually assigned to the Waffen SS and is killed by an American shell in the last days of the war - and though not involved in any war crime, shares in the post-war opprobrium of the SS. In the aftermath of the war the two sisters - both scarred by the war and grieving for their respective lovers - have an explosive meeting, ending with the Lotte vehemently disowning her "Nazi" sister Anna (who, in fact, had little sympathy with Nazi ideology).

Decades later, at their old age, they meet again accidentally at a spa and become reconciled.

The two girls/women are each played by three different actors, from the Netherlands and Germany respectively.

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.

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