Agnieszka Holland

Early life and education Holland was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1948. She is the daughter of journalists Irena (née Rybczyńska) and Henryk Holland, who had been a prominent Communist activist since 1935 and a captain in the Soviet Army. Holland's mother was Roman Catholic and her father Jewish, but she was not brought up in either faith. Her father, Henryk Holland, lost his parents in a ghetto during the Holocaust, and spent most of his adult life denying his own Jewishness. Holland's father was an ardent Communist journalist whose publications against a number of prominent professors led to their dismissals by the Communist regime. Holland's mother participated in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising as a member of the Polish resistance movement. Holland's Catholic mother aided several Jews during the Holocaust and received the Righteous Among the Nations medal from the Yad Vashem Institute in Israel. When she was eleven, her parents, whose marriage had been continuously contentious, divorced, and her mother soon remarried a Jewish journalist, Stanisław Brodski.

Holland describes her relationship with her father as influential, but very distant. According to her "he was very interesting, very intelligent, and in the last years of his life he gave me a lot of doors to the art and the film. But he wasn't really interested in the young children and he only noticed me when he wanted to make a kind of show". Holland recalls being shown off to her father's friends during late-night gatherings, and then being ignored in the morning when he was no longer entertaining.

Holland attended the Stefan Batory Gymnasium and Lyceum in Warsaw. After high school, she studied at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) because, as she said in an interview, she thought the Czechoslovak films of the 1960s were very interesting: "I watched first films of Miloš Forman, Ivan Passer, and Věra Chytilová. They seemed to be fantastically interesting to me, unlike what was being made in Poland at that time". At FAMU, she also met her future husband and fellow director, Laco Adamik.

Holland witnessed the Prague Spring of 1968 while in Czechoslovakia, and was arrested for her support of the dissident movement for the government reforms and political liberalization. She describes her time in Prague as her "introduction to politics, violence, beauty, art, marriage, film and other arts...everything that happened to [her] after was based on this Czechoslovak experience". During her imprisonment she spent time in a cell between two inmates who had fallen in love. It became her job to pass erotic notes and messages between them. Holland herself said that "it was like phone sex and I was the cable". She returned to Poland, and wrote her first screenplay. Though it was censored and prevented from being developed, it attracted the attention of Andrzej Wajda, who became her mentor. Her daughter with Adamik, Kasia (born 28 December 1972), is also a director.

The events and confusing identities that made up her childhood resulted in Holland being known to have a significant struggle with identity, which manifests itself in many of her most famous films, specifically those related to Polish-Jewish interactions during the Holocaust. According to Holland, the tense relationship between ethnic Jews and Poles is still an ongoing issue. She claims that "Jews from Poland are still hostile to the Polish...There are things in Catholicism and Polish nationalism which are deeply anti-Semitic". Her film Europa, Europa brought her success and recognition in Hollywood, but she has always faced trouble in her career and life due to her past. Holland's "mixed Polish Catholic and Jewish ancestry...places her at the hub of this century's violence". These conflicts and hardships have been the inspiration for films such as Europa, Europa and In Darkness.

Career

Holland began her career as an assistant director for Polish film directors Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda. Her credits include Zanussi's 1973 film Iluminacja (Illumination), and Wajda's 1983 film Danton. She was first assistant director on Wajda's 1976 Man of Marble, an experience which gave her the capability to explore political and moral issues within the confines of an oppressive regime. ) and A Lonely Woman (Kobieta samotna) in 1981, before immigrating to France shortly before the December 1981 imposition of martial law in Poland. She was told that she could not return to Poland, and was unable to see or even have any contact with her daughter for over eight months.

Holland's depiction of the Holocaust Some of Holland's most famous work has been her depictions of the Holocaust. These works have been controversial because of Holland's commitment to realism, and the acceptance of all types of individuals both as victims and as flawed human beings deserving of guilt. According to an article written about Holland, her films about the Holocaust "cling to the world as she sees it. A world in which wisdom, if it exists at all, lies in accepting the violence and human frailty in everyone, without exception, including Jewish people". The following year she directed "Moral Midgetry", the eighth episode of the third season of the HBO drama series The Wire. In 2006, Holland returned to direct the eighth episode of the fourth season ("Corner Boys"). Both were written by novelist Richard Price. Show runner David Simon said that Holland was "wonderful behind the camera" and staged the fight between Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell in "Moral Midgetry" well.

In 2007 Holland, her sister Magdalena Łazarkiewicz and her daughter Katarzyna Adamik directed the Polish political drama series Ekipa, and in 2008 Holland became the first president of the Polish Film Academy. On 5 February 2009, the Krakow Post reported that Holland would direct a biopic about Krystyna Skarbek entitled Christine: War My Love.

Her 2011 film, In Darkness, was selected as the Polish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 84th Academy Awards. In January 2012, the film was one of the five nominees. and selected for a Special Presentation screening at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. She also won the Czech Lion Award in the Best Director category for this TV series.

On 1 December 2013, the film screened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where Holland was invited to deliver the Rajiv Vaidya Memorial Lecture: Viewing History through the Filmmaker's Lens. It was also shown at the 2013 Philadelphia Film Festival. Holland was a guest speaker at Brooklyn College.

In December 2013, Holland was announced as director of NBC's next miniseries Rosemary's Baby, a two-part version of the best selling novel by Ira Levin with Zoe Saldaña.

Holland took over the chairmanship of the European Film Academy board in January 2014.

In March 2016, it was announced that Holland was set to direct an adaptation of Peter Swanson's best-selling novel The Kind Worth Killing, a psychological thriller about a ruthless female killer.

In February 2017, Agnieszka Holland received The Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize for Spoor. The award is given to the films that are perceived to open new perspectives in the art of film.

In 2019, she won the Golden Lions Award (Polish: Złote Lwy) at the 44th Gdynia Film Festival for her historical film Mr. Jones, which deals with the subject of the Great Famine in Ukraine. On 23 November 2019, Agnieszka Holland and Anne Applebaum were awarded Orders of Princess Olga, 3rd Class by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for their efforts in promoting the memory of the Holodomor.

In 2020, her next film Charlatan was selected as the Czech entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 93rd Academy Awards making the February shortlist. The same year, she was honoured with the FIPRESCI Platinum Award at the Sofia International Film Festival.

In 2023, her film Green Border, which portrays the plight of migrants caught in the Belarus–European Union border crisis, premiered at the 80th Venice International Film Festival where it was awarded the Special Jury Prize. The film caused much controversy, and met with strong criticism from Polish government officials, who accused Holland of painting a bad image abroad of Polish border guards. In October 2023, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association selected Holland as the winner of the association's Career Achievement Award stating that "With moral clarity, deep empathy and invigorating filmmaking, her work lays bare the damage that oppressive regimes and sociopolitical conflicts wreak on everyday souls". On 12 October 2023, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the National Film School in Łódź. In July 2024, she was announced as a jury member at the 81st Venice International Film Festival. On 28 October 2024, Holland was awarded Medal of Merit from the Czech president Petr Pavel for her cultural impact.

In 2025, her Franz Kafka biopic Franz premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. It was selected as Poland's submission for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, but it was not nominated.

Filmography

Feature films

Short films Jesus Christ's Sin (Grzech Boga, 1970) - Short Evening at Abdon's (Wieczór u Abdona, 1975) - TV short film Golden Dreams (2001) - Documentary

Television Pictures from Life: A Girl and Aquarius (Obrazki z życia: dziewczyna i "Akwarius", 1975) Red Wind (episode of Fallen Angels, 1994) Shot in the Heart (2001) Cold Case (2004) The Wire Episode 3.08 "Moral Midgetry" (2004) A Girl Like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story (2006) Ekipa (2007) The Killing Episode 1.06 "What You Have Left" (2011) Episode 1.09 "Undertow" (2011) Episode 2.01 "Reflections" (2012) Treme Episode 1.01 "Do You Know What It Means" (2010) Episode 1.10 "I'll Fly Away" (2010) Episode 2.10 "That's What Lovers Do" (2011) Episode 4.05 "...To Miss New Orleans" (2013) Burning Bush (2013) Rosemary's Baby (2014) House of Cards Episode 3.10 "Chapter 36" (2015) Episode 3.11 "Chapter 37" (2015) Episode 5.10 "Chapter 62" (2017) The Affair Episode 3.6 (2015) The First Episode 1.01 "Separation" (2018) Episode 1.02 "What's Needed" (2018)

Other work Agnieszka Holland translated the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being from Czech to Polish. She volunteered for this task after meeting the author, Milan Kundera, in 1982, and reading the manuscript; both were living in Paris at that time. Holland found the events of the book relatable not only to her personal experience of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia but also to the strikes of 1980 in Poland, and therefore wanted to introduce the book to the Polish audience. The translation was originally published by the London-based publisher Aneks and has since been widely reprinted.

In 2023, Holland appeared as a guest star in the Polish Netflix series Absolute Beginners.