The Secret Garden

Agnieszka Holland (born November 28, 1948) is a Polish film and TV director and screenwriter. Best recognized for her highly political contributions to Polish cinema, Holland is one of Poland’s most prominent filmmakers. She was born in Warsaw, Poland, the daughter of journalists Irena (née Rybczynska) and Henryk Holland. Her Jewish father’s parents were killed in the ghetto, and her mother was a Catholic who fought in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and was a member of the Polish Underground. Holland was raised without religion. Holland’s mother later re-married to journalist Stanislaw Brodzki. Holland is the mother of Kasia Adamik, another Polish film director.

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.

Perhaps Holland’s best-known and well-regarded film is 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 noted Polish writer and director, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Holland collaborated on the screenplay for his film, Three Colors: Blue. Like Kieślowski, Holland frequently examines issues of faith in her work.

In a 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), Julia Walking Home (2001) and The Healer (2004). Her most recent film is Copying Beethoven (2006).

In 2004 she directed “Moral Midgetry” the eighth episode of the third season of HBO drama series The Wire. She returned in 2006 to direct the eighth episode of the fourth season “Corner Boys”. Both episodes were written by acclaimed novelist Richard Price. Show runner David Simon credits producer Nina K. Noble for attracting Holland to the show through their association working on HBO movie Shot In The Heart. Simon said that Holland was “wonderful behind the camera” and did an excellent job of staging the fight between Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell in “Moral Midgetry”.

In 2007 she directed together with her sister Magdalena Łazarkiewicz and daughter Katarzyna Adamik the Polish political drama series Ekipa. She is currently on the faculty as filmmaker-in-residence at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.

On 5 February 2009 Krakow Post reported Holland will direct a biopic about Krystyna Skarbek entitled Christine: War My Love. –Wikipedia