Agnieszka Holland was born in 1948 in Warsaw. She graduated from the FAMU Film School in Prague in 1971. She started her career in film by working with Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda, who became her mentor. Her directing debut was the TV film Evening at Abdon’s (1975). Her first film on the big screen, Provincial Actors (1978), one of the most prominent examples of the so-called ‘moral anxiety cinema’, won the FIPRESCI award in Cannes in 1980. A year later, when martial law was declared in Poland, Holland emigrated to France.
The filmmaker has created many films in international collaboration, particularly Europa, Europa (1990), which was nominated for the Academy Awards for best screenplay. She was also nominated for an Oscar in 1985 and 2012, both times in the Best Foreign Language Film category, for Angry Harvest and In Darkness. She collaborated with her friend Krzysztof Kieślowski, working on the screenplay for his Three Colours trilogy.
The director made Burning Bush for HBO Europe, based on the suicide of Jan Palach, the 21-year-old Prague student who self-immolated in protest against the Communist regime and the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops, as well as Rosemary’s Baby, created for the American TV station NBC. Holland was also one of the directors of 1983, the first Polish TV series made for Netflix.
