Agnieszka Holland

Born in Warsaw in 1948 writer-director Agnieszka Holland studied at Prague’s renowned FAMU, The Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of the Performing Arts and graduated in 1971, upon which she returned to Poland. She began her film career working as assistant director to Krzysztof Zanussi and with 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. Earlier in her career, she directed theatre plays, sometimes with her then-husband, Laco Adamik. In 1981, Ms. Holland decided to emigrate to France.

In the films she made after leaving Poland, Ms. Holland continued to portray people looking for ways out, striving for self-fulfillment, pursuing happiness and failing or being forced to settle for a dubious compromise, as seen in Washington Square (1997) or Europa Europa (1990), which received an Academy Award® nomination for Best Screenplay and won the Golden Globe® for Best Foreign Language Film as well as the Best Foreign Language Film Awards from the New York Film Critics Circle, The Boston Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review. Holland also received an Academy Award® nomination in 1985 for Best Foreign Language Film for Angry Harvest (1985). She collaborated with her friend Krzysztof Kieslowski on the screenplay of his acclaimed trilogy, Three Colors (1993).

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), and Julie Walking Home (2001). Her most recent films are Copying Beethoven (2006) and In Darkness (2011). In 2008, Holland was honored with a retrospective of her films at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Holland has also been active in television. In 2007 she directed with her sister Magdalena Łazarkiewicz and her daughter Katarzyna Adamik the Polish political drama series Ekipa. In 2004 she directed “Moral Midgetry” for the third season of The Wire, the HBO series created by David Simon. She returned in 2006 to direct “Corner Boys” for the fourth season. Both episodes were written by acclaimed novelist Richard Price; she directed another episode for the fifth season. When David Simon and his team created their new HBO series, Treme, they asked Holland to direct both the pilot and the finale of the first season. She was nominated for an Emmy® for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series (2010) for the pilot.

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

Schmidtz Katze Filmkollektiv¨