Born: November 28, 1948, Warsaw, Poland
Summary. Internationally acclaimed filmmaker whose harshly realistic but sensitively handled dramas- many based on real-life events- have won her a growing audience in the United States . Best recognized for her highly politicized contributions to Polish New Wave cinema, Agnieszka Holland ranks as one of Poland's most prominent filmmakers. A friend of the great Polish writer and director, late Krzysztof Kieslowski, she collaborated on the screeplay for his film, Three Colors: Blue. . Like Kieslowski, in her films Holland frequently examines issues of faith.
Early days. She was born to a Jewish father, Henryk Holland, and a Catholic mother, Irena Rybczynska, both reporters, and was raised a Catholic. She studied filmmaking in Prague during the late 1960s (her professors included Milos Forman and Ivan Passer). Holland graduated from the Prague Film and TV Academy (FAMU) in 1971.
Professional achievements. After returning to Poland from Czechoslovakia, where she married a Czech filmmaker, Laco Adamik, she began her career as an assistant director for the Polish film directors Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda, including Zanussi's 1973 film Iluminacja and Wajda's 1982 film Danton (she worked on the screenplay). After co-directing her first feature, Screen Tests (1976), in which she also acted, she wrote the screenplay for Wajda’s Without Anesthesia (1979).
Holland's first major film was Provincial Actors (Aktorzy Prowincjonalni, 1978), a chronicle of the tense backstage relations within a small town theater company that served as a metaphor for Poland's contemporary political situation. The film won the International Critics Prize at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival. Holland only directed two more major films in Poland: Fever (Gorączka, 1980) whose heroes are young PPS-men at the beginnings of 20-th century (PPS is the acronym of Polish Socialist Party) for which she won the Golden Lion award in Gdynia (1981) and A Lonely Woman (Kobieta samotna, 1981), for which she got a Special Jury Prize in Gdynia, before emigrating to Paris, France, just before martial law was declared in Poland in December, 1981.
In 1982 she directed Postcards from Paris for French TV. Holland received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film for her 1985 film Angry Harvest (Bittere Ernte, Germany), an examination of the relationship between a gentile farmer and the Jewish woman he conceals during World War II, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. This was followed by 1985 documentary Culture.
The director's defining work, and perhaps her best film, was Europa Europa (1991), based on the biography of Solomon Perel, a Jewish teenager who fled Germany for Poland following Kristallnacht, in 1938. Upon the outbreak of World War II and the German invasion of Poland, Perel fled to the Soviet-occupied section of Poland. Later captured during the German invasion of Russia in 1941, Solomon convinced an SS officer that he was German, and found himself enrolled in an elite SS military academy. The film won a Golden Globe and garnered Holland her second Academy Award nomination for best foreign film.
In an 1988 interview, she said that although women were important in her films, feminism was not the central theme of her work. Rather she suggested that when she was making films in Poland under the communist regime, there was an atmosphere of cross-gender solidarity against censorship, which was seen as the main political issue. Holland's later films include Kill the Priest (1988, France-UK), about murder of Jerzy Popieluszko, Polish priest murdered by security services. Next came Olivier, Olivier (1992), for which she was nominated for Academy Award for screenplay. This was followed by beautifully photographed version of The Secret Garden (1993) -- one of the director's numerous Hollywood forays. In 1994 she has directed Red Wind a thriller for US television based on a novel of Raymond Chandler
A year later she made Total Eclipse which deals with a homosexual liaison between French poets Verlaine and Rimbaud. She was nominated for it for Golden Seashell at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. In 1996 she has directed Washington Square starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Albert Finney.
In 1998, Holland directed The Third Miracle, a drama about religious faith and the nature of miracles. About her The Third Miracle wrote C. M. Barsotti and R. K. Johnston, Finding God in the Movies: 33 Films of Reel Faith, Baker Books: Grand Rapids, Michigan (2004), page 243-244: “Director Agnieszka Holland is a practicing Catholic. When she read the screenplay she was deeply touched because it took faith seriously. She says that the protagonist, Frank Shore is struggling, "as I am struggling," to have faith in today's world, with so many problems, suffering, materialism, etc. She also was fascinated with other questions. What does it mean to be a saint? What kind of saint does the church need today? What does the Catholic Church mean to people today? Thus, one of her motivations for making the film was to portray issues of faith and religion in a positive and compelling way. She decided this would not be possible unless she could get Ed Harris, with whom she had worked before, to play the part of Frank Shore. She sent him the script, and he liked it.”
She also directed the HBO production Shot in the Heart (2001), Julia Walking Home (2001) and a documentary Golden Dreams (2001) for Disneland. Her most recent film is The Healer (2004).
Agnieszka Holland is mother of Kasia Adamik, another talented Polish film director.
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