Interview with Agnieszka Holland

Abstract

Agnieszka Holland is known as one of the few women directors working today in Hollywood, and one of the only ones who is not primarily an actress or industry insider. Actually, Holland appears to be as much of an outsider as they come-a woman and a foreigner, her life and career could easily be a subject of a movie of its own. Born in Poland in 1948, Holland is the daughter of two prominent journalists, a Catholic mother and a Jewish father. Her father died in mysterious circumstances during a political investigation when Agnieszka was only thirteen years old. Though the official account claimed suicide, many believe he was killed, pushed from a window to his death. Holland herself was marked by her Jewishness and split national heritage, her family's political past, and her own indomitable will. She found it impossible to enter film school in Poland during the period of high anti-semitism in the sixties, so she applied to the famous Prague Film Academy where she was one of the 7 accepted among 220 applicants. She studied in Prague during the most interesting period in recent Czechoslovak film history, at the time of the Czechoslovak New Wave of the 1960s which saw the making of such films as Loves of a Blond (1965) and Firemen's Ball (1967) by young Milos Forman and 1965 and 1967 Academy Award Winners for the best foreign movie, The Shop on Main Street by Kadair and Klos and Menzel's Closely Watched Trains. Holland