Agnieszka Holland

Agnieszka Holland (; born 28 November 1948) is a Polish film and television director and screenwriter, best known for her political contributions to Polish cinema. She began her career as assistant to directors Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda, and emigrated 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 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 Alfred Bauer Prize (Silver Bear) for her film Spoor at the Berlin International 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. 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 was a prominent Communist activist since 1935 and a captain of 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 of her 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.