Agnieszka Holland becomes the new president of the European Film Academy and will replace the German director Wim Wenders, who has held this position since 1996. She was the chairman of this institution since 2014. The European Film Academy supports and promotes the European cinema and organizes conferences, lobbying around the European cinema, organizes awards…
Agnieszka Holland was born in Warsaw on November 28th, 1948 is film and TV director and screenwriter and highly engaged militant. She began her career with the best Polish director among them Andrzej Wajda or Krzysztof Zanussi. Among her films, some of them are distinguished for their career: Europa Europa (1991) and drama In Darkness (2011), nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 84th Academy Awards and recently for the spectacular movie showing the hidden hunger in Ukraine in 1933, Mr. Jones (2019).
Her early life can explain her activism. The daughter of the journalists Irena and Henryk Holland. Her father was a communist activist and captain of the Polish Army, her mother was a Catholic and her father a Jewish, she was not raised in religion. Her father lost his parents during the holocaust and spent a major part of his life denying his origins, her mother was a resistant of the Warsaw Uprising and helped several Jews during the holocaust. She was awarded of the Righteous Among the Nation medal from the Yad Vashem Institute.
Her father died during a police interrogatory when she was 13, official reported that the death was cause was a suicide, her family believes that he was murdered by the communist police by defenestration.
She studied at 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) where she met her future husband and fellow director, Laco Adamik and was graduated in 1971. In Prague, she witnessed the Prague Spring, where she was arrested for her support of the ‘dissident movement’ she spent some times in Prison. She learned a lot in Prague about politic, violence, but also about beauty, art, movies….
In the first part of her career, she was unable to release any films under her own name because of the harsh censorship of Communist authorities. Her first major film was Provincial Actors, 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.–
Her films explore a wide range of subjects: the holocaust, the communism, the feminism, the politic, the censorship, the LGBTQ+…
She also directed international series episodes, the Episode 8 of the 3rd season of ‘The Wire’, the Episode 8 of the 4th season of ‘Corner Boy’, the HBO miniseries ‘Burning Bush’, NBC’s Roman Polanski movie miniseries adaptation: The Rosemary Baby’. She also directed international series episodes, the Episode 8 of the 3rd season of ‘The Wire’, the Episode 8 of the 4th season of ‘Corner Boy’, the HBO miniseries ‘Burning Bush’, NBC’s Roman Polanski movie miniseries adaptation: The Rosemary Baby, the Netflix series ‘1983’ and several episodes of ‘The House of Cards’.
Beautiful Warszawa 