The German film Hannas Reise was shown in the U.S. with the title Hanna's Journey (2013). It was co-written and directed by Julia von Heinz.
Caroline Schuch plays Hanna, a recent college graduate who is at the top of her game. She's beautiful, she's intelligent, and she's certain to get a truly prestigious job. Except . . . the people interviewing her think that she hasn't really seen the world, or done anything in it. Being the savvy person that she is, Hanna tells them that she can't start work until she's spent some time working with people with handicaps in Israel. Definitely a good career move.
Hanna can say that she'll do that because her mother runs an agency that places people into programs like this. Hanna sets off for Israel, where she finds a chaotic living situation. (The agency has a truly horrible housing location in Israel.) However, she gets past that, only to learn that dealing with people with disabilities is difficult, You can't just pick it up as you go. One of the stipulations of the placement is that Hanna visit a concentration camp survivor, and that isn't easy either.
Most coming of age stories involve adolescents, and Hanna is hardly that. However, she does, indeed, come of age in Israel. What she sees and does in Israel changes her present life, and will probably change her future life as well.
We saw this film at the Rochester JCC Hart Theatre, as part of the vaunted Rochester International Film Festival. It will work well on a small screen.
Note: as I write this review, "Hanna's Journey" has a terrible IMDb rating of 6.3, I don't understand why people rated it so low. It's much better than that.
