Agnieszka Holland

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Agnieszka Holland (born November 28, 1948 in Warsaw, Poland) is a film and TV director and screenplay writer.

She was born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother and was raised a Catholic. Best recognized for her highly politicial contributions to Polish New Wave cinema, Agnieszka Holland ranks as one of Poland's most prominent filmmakers. Holland graduated from the Prague Film and TV Academy (FAMU) in 1971. She began her career as an assistant director for the Polish film directors Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda, including Zanussi's 1973 film Illuminacja and Wajda's 1982 film Danton.

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) and A Lonely Woman (Kobieta samotna, 1981), before emigrating to France, just before martial law was declared in Poland in December, 1981.

Holland received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film for her 1985 film Angry Harvest, a German production about a Jewish woman on the run in World War II.

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, Soloman 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 became one of the most successful German films released in the US, winning a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. A friend of the great Polish writer and director, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Holland collaborated on the screeplay for his film, Three Colors: Blue. Like Kieślowski, Holland frequently examines issues of faith in her work.

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 Olivier, Olivier (1992), The Secret Garden (1993), Total Eclipse (1995),Washington Square (1997), the HBO production Shot in the Heart (2001) and Julia Walking Home (2001). Her most recent film is The Healer (2004).

She is mother of Kasia Adamik, another Polish film director.

Contents

[edit] Quotes

  • "His penis saved his soul. Otherwise, he might have become a total Nazi." (on Europa Europa protagonist Solomon Perel, a circumcised Jew who posed as an "Aryan" German during World War II to escape persecution)

[edit] Selected filmography

[edit] Literature

[edit] External links

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