Agnieszka Holland

Agnieszka Holland (born 1948) is one of the most renowned figures in Polish film. Best known for her films made in exile from her homeland, including Europa Europa (1990) and The Secret Garden (1993), she is famous for her anti-authoritarian politics and her sensitive treatments of Polish 20th-century history, including several films that examine the Holocaust. A student of the famous FAMU school in Prague, she cut her directorial teeth as an assistant to Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda. Holland was forced into exile in Western Europe after her bitterly subversive 1981 feature A Woman Alone was banned by the communist government. It would be more than three decades before Holland would work in Poland again; in the meantime, she established herself on the international scene with the Oscar-nominated Bitter Harvest (1985). In recent years she has worked in both the US and Poland, and has made a name for herself as a director-for-hire on numerous “prestige TV” series, including The Wire, The Killing, and House of Cards.