We Were the Lucky Ones (2024)

I need to highly recommend We Were the Lucky Ones (2024), a miniseries currently airing on Hulu. It’s a fictionalized version of a real-life story, about a Polish Jewish family just before and during World War II. Various members of the family go in different directions, and it’s impressively touching and fascinating: some join the resistance, some hide out, some suffer immensely, and one family member heads from Paris to Rio de Janeiro but stops along the way in Senegal and Morocco. So there’s a huge variety of experiences, some of which I’ve never seen on screen before (or even really heard about).

Furthermore, the series is well-written/acted/directed/etc. The family is believably close-knit but has their realistic stressors, and there’s no cloying tropes here.

The costumes were designed by Lisa Duncan (Small Axe, National Civil War Centre Film Series). She told Indiewire, “There is still a lot of original period clothing from that era, which is amazing, but many of the pieces that have survived are very small sizes — or evening wear which wasn’t over-worn at the time” (Where Do All Those World War 2 Costumes Come from?). Which I assume means many of the clothes were built,  not bought.

Yes, given that this story involves the Holocaust, there’s definitely a large amount of this kind of thing:

But there’s also the early years, plus all those family members going in different directions, so there’s a whole lot of stylish outfits like these:

“When a fam­i­ly pho­to­graph sur­faced just days before we were due to shoot my grand­par­ents’ wed­ding scene, our cos­tume design­er, Lisa Dun­can, piv­ot­ed from her orig­i­nal cloth­ing choic­es and had repli­cas made of the dress and suit they wore on their actu­al wed­ding day. She also cre­at­ed repli­cas of the dress­es my great-aunt Feli­cia wore as a child — dress­es I’d dis­cov­ered in a col­lec­tion at Yad Vashem after the book was pub­lished. There are scenes in the series of our young Feli­cia (who goes by Bar­bara in the con­vent, the name stitched into her dress) wear­ing out­fits iden­ti­cal to those Feli­cia wore in real life” (novel author and family descendent Georgia Hunter, quoted in Bring­ing the Kurc Fam­i­ly to the Screen: A Con­ver­sa­tion with Geor­gia Hunter).

Some of the best photos I’ve found of the costumes are on designer Duncan’s Instagram:

 

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Have you seen We Were the Lucky Ones? What did you think?