Agnieszka Holland - Personal Life

Personal Life

Agnieszka Holland was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1948. She is the daughter of two prominent journalists, Irena (née Rybczyńska) and Henryk Holland, a Catholic mother and a Jewish father. Holland herself was raised without religion. Her father’s parents were killed in the ghetto; her mother participated in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and was a member of the Polish Underground.

Her father died under mysterious circumstances during a police interrogation when Holland was only thirteen years old. Although the official reports labeled her father’s death a suicide, many believe he was murdered, pushed from a window to his death. Holland’s mother later remarried to journalist Stanislaw Brodzki.

Holland was a sickly child, and spent much of her time writing, drawing and directing short plays with other children.

Holland attended Gimnazjum i Liceum im. Stefana Batorego (Warsaw, Poland). Although not Jewish herself, Holland found herself marked by her Jewish heritage, mixed ancestry and family’s political past. Holland found it difficult to enter film school in Poland, because of the high levels of anti-Semitism promoted by the occupying communist regime in Poland during the 1960s, and the male domination of the Polish film industry. Holland then applied to the Prague Film Academy where she was one of 220 applicants ultimately accepted. She also met her future husband and fellow director, Laco Adamik, who still lives in Poland.

Holland studied in Prague during the Czechoslovak New Wave of the 1960s, and also witnessed the Prague Spring of 1968, a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia. She spent six weeks in prison for her support of government reforms.

She graduated from the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) in 1971.