Agnieszka Holland

Film director

Agnieszka Holland is an acclaimed Polish film and television director and screenwriter, born in 1948 in Warsaw. Educated at the FAMU film school in Prague, she began her career in the 1970s under the mentorship of Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda. Her early films, such as Provincial Actors (1979) and Fever (1981) were critical of the communist regime in Poland, leading to censorship and her emigration to France during the imposition of martial law. Her 1990 film Europa Europa received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay and won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. Other notable works include Olivier, Olivier (1992), The Secret Garden (1993), In Darkness (2011), and Mr. Jones (2019), centred on the Holodomor famine in Soviet Ukraine. Agnieszka Holland served as president of the European Film Academy from 2021 to 2024. She is a vocal advocate for democracy, human rights and artistic freedom. Her 2023 film Green Border examines the treatment of refugees at the Polish-Belarusian border.