Our People

Having graduated from FAMU, the Prague film school in 1971, Agnieszka Holland returned to Poland. She began her film career working with Krzysztof Zanussi as assistant director, and Andrzej Wajda as her mentor. Her TV film debut was An Evening at Abdon’s (1975) and her first feature film was Provincial Actors (1978), one of the flagship pictures of the “cinema of moral disquiet” and the winner of the International Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980. In 1981, after Marshall Law in Poland, Holland emigrated to France.

In the West she made several movies, among others Europa Europa (1990), which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay. Holland had also received an Academy Award nominations in 1985 and 2012 (Best Foreign Language Film for Angry Harvest and In Darkness). She collaborated with her friend, Krzysztof Kieslowski, on the screenplay of his trylogy, Three Colors (1993). Holland’s later films include To Kill a Priest, Angry Harvest, Europa Europa, Olivier Olivier (1992), The Secret Garden (1993), Total Eclipse (1995), Washington Square (1997), Third Miracle (1999) the HBO production Shot in the Heart (2001), Julia Walking Home (2001), Copying Beethoven (2006) and In Darkness (2011).

She edited and directed several episodes of some important US TV series such as The Wire, Treme, The Killing, House of Cards. She directed the mini-series Burning Bush, a three part drama series for HBO Europe, inspired by the actions of Jan Palach, a 21-year-old student who set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square in Prague in 1969 as a protest against the communist regime and the occupation of Prague by Soviet bloc armies, and Rosemary’s Baby, a TV miniseries that premiered on NBC in May 2014. Her latest feature film is Spoor, based on Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead. Spoor premiered at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival (2017) where it was awarded Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize for “opening new perspectives on cinematic art”.

Her last projects- TV series 1983 for Netflix and feature film Gareth Jones are in post- production, to be released in following months.

Agnieszka Holland has also written or co-written screenplays for films made by other directors and directed plays for the Polish Television.