Agnieszka Holland - Career

Career

She began her career as an assistant director for the Polish film directors Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda, including Zanussi's 1973 film Iluminacja ("Illumination") and Wajda's 1982 film Danton. She served as First Assistant Director on Wajda’s Man of Marble (1977), an experience which supplied her with the capability to explore political and moral issues within the confines of an oppressive regime.

Holland's first major film was Aktorzy Prowincjonalni ("Provincial actors", 1978), a chronicle of tense backstage relations within a small-town theater company that served as an allegory 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) and Kobieta samotna ("A Lonely Woman", 1981), before emigrating to France, just before martial law was declared in Poland in December 1981. She was informed that she could not return to Poland, and as a result was not able to see or contact her daughter for over eight months.

Fever was entered into the 31st Berlin International Film Festival.

Knowing that she could not return to Poland, she attempted to recreate herself abroad, writing scripts for fellow exiled Polish filmmakers such as Wajda’s Danton (1982), A Love in Germany (1983), The Possessed (1988), and Korczak (1990). She also developed her own projects alongside Western European production companies, creating such films as Angry Harvest (1985), To Kill a Priest (1988) and Oliver, Oliver (1992). Holland received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film for her Angry Harvest, a German production about a Jewish woman on the run in World War II.

Perhaps Holland's best-known and most well-regarded film is 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 a German officer that he was German and found himself enrolled in the Hitler Youth. The film received a lukewarm reception in Germany and the German Oscar selection committee did not include the film as a submission for the 1991 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. However, it caught the attention of Michael Barker, who was responsible for handling Orion Classics’ sales at the time. Europa, Europa was released in the United States to much praise and fanfare, winning a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

A friend of the noted Polish writer and director, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Holland collaborated on the screenplay for his film, Three Colors: Blue. Like Kieślowski, Holland frequently examines issues of faith in her work.

Much of her film work has a heavy political slant. Government reprisals, stifling bureaucratic machinery, sanctioned strikes and dysfunctional familial structures were all represented in her earlier work as a filmmaker.

In a 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. She stated that she was interested in the happenings between people, not the politics occurring outside them, and under this context, “maybe you could say that all my movies are political.”

Holland's later films include Olivier, Olivier (1992), The Secret Garden (1993), Total Eclipse (1995), Washington Square (1997), the HBO production Shot in the Heart (2001), Julie Walking Home (2001) and Copying Beethoven (2006).

In a 1997 interview, in response to how her life experiences as a director have influenced her films, Holland stated that “filmmakers of the younger generation lack life experience,” and, as a result, many of the tools needed to breath humanity into their respective characters. Compared to the directors of her generation, she feels that the younger generation comes from wealthy families, goes straight to film schools and watching movies mostly on videotapes. This has resulted in what she refers to as a “numbness” and “conventionalization” of today’s cinema.

In 2004, she directed "Moral Midgetry" the eighth episode of the third season of HBO drama series The Wire. She returned in 2006 to direct the eighth episode of the fourth season "Corner Boys". Both episodes were written by acclaimed novelist Richard Price. Show runner David Simon said that Holland was "wonderful behind the camera" and did an excellent job of staging the fight between Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell in "Moral Midgetry".

In 2007 she directed, together with her sister Magdalena Łazarkiewicz and daughter Katarzyna Adamik, the Polish political drama series Ekipa.

On February 5, 2009 the Krakow Post reported that Holland will direct a biopic about Krystyna Skarbek entitled Christine: War My Love.

Her 2011 film In Darkness has been selected as the Polish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 84th Academy Awards. In January 2012, the film was named as one of the five nominees.

Holland has accepted the offer to film a three-part drama for HBO about Jan Palach, who immolated himself in January 1969 to protest the "Normalization", which came after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

She is currently on the faculty as filmmaker-in-residence at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.