Agnieszka Holland (Polish: [aɡˈɲɛʂka ˈxɔlːant]; born 28 November 1948) is a Polish film and television director and screenwriter, best known for her cultural and political contributions to Polish cinema. She began her career as an assistant to directors Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda, and immigrated to France shortly before the 1981 imposition of the martial law in Poland.
Holland is best known for her films Europa Europa (1990), for which she received a Golden Globe Award as well as an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay nomination, The Secret Garden (1993), Angry Harvest and the Holocaust drama In Darkness, the last two of which were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 2017, she received the Alfred Bauer Prize (Silver Bear) for her film Spoor at the Berlin International Film Festival. She is also a four-time winner of the Grand Prix at the Gdynia Film Festival. In 2020, she was elected President of the European Film Academy. In 2023, her film Green Border won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival.
In her films, Holland often focuses on the individual experiences of people who find themselves on the sidelines of political events. A recurring theme she explores is the critique of Nazi and communist crimes.
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.
Holland was often ill as a child, and spent much time writing, drawing and directing short plays with other children. 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. When she was thirteen, her father died by suicide while under house arrest in Warsaw.
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". During her time in Prague and in prison, she realized "she'd rather be an artist than an agitator". Holland graduated from FAMU in 1971. 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.
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. Though she had a large role to play in the success of this film, her name was kept off of the credits because of censorship laws. In the first part of her career, owing to censorship by Communist authorities, Holland was unable to release any films under her own name. Wajda offered to adopt her, but she refused, convinced that she could eventually release films under own name. Her first major film was Provincial Actors (Aktorzy Prowincjonalni), a 1978 chronicle of tense backstage relations within a small-town theater company which was an allegory of Poland's contemporary political situation. It won the International Critics Prize at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival.
Holland directed two more major films in Poland, Fever (Gorączka, 1980; entered in the 31st Berlin International Film Festival) 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. During this time, though safe, Holland was unable to create any successful films on her own.
Knowing she could not return to communist Poland, Holland wrote scripts for fellow Polish filmmakers: Wajda's Danton, A Love in Germany (1983), The Possessed (1988) and Korczak (1990). She also developed her own projects with Western European production companies, directing Angry Harvest (1985), To Kill a Priest (1988) and Olivier, Olivier (1992). Holland received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film for Angry Harvest, a West German production about a Jewish woman on the run during World War II.
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". This is most poignant in Holland's 2011 film In Darkness, in which Jewish and Polish Catholic characters are juxtaposed as having some of the same reprehensible qualities as well as redeemable ones.