After spending five years focusing on high school and acceptance into university, Ariella Glaser has returned to the screen. She stars alongside Helen Mirren and Gillian Anderson in the upcoming adaptation of White Bird, a graphic novel from R. J. Palacio’s wildly popular Wonder series. The Holocaust coming-of-age drama, directed by Marc Forster, tells the story of Sara Blum in flashes back and forth between 1942, when she’s a young Jewish girl (Glaser) in Nazi-occupied France, and the present day, when she’s a grandmother (Mirren) telling her grandson how she survived the Second World War. To prepare for the role of Blum, Glaser, who is Jewish, read her own family’s accounts of the Holocaust. “I think that the whole message of the story and its relation to the Holocaust is [that] something like this, genocides like this, cannot be allowed to happen again,” says Glaser. “And I think the point of making a film like this is to remind people of that.” —Paulina Prosnitz