A Lonely Woman

Agnieszka Holland is a Polish film and stage director, screenwriter, and translator. She has been the president of the European Film Academy since 2014. She began her career in the 1970s when, following her return to Poland after graduating from Prague's FAMU film school, she worked on productions by Krzysztof Zanussi (as an assistant on the set of Illumination) and Andrzej Wajda, with whom she co-founded the Iks film company. She wrote the screenplays for several of Wajda's films, including Rough Treatment, A Love in Germany, and Korczak, as well as for films by other directors, including Jerzy Bogajewicz and Andrzej Zajączkowski. She also worked as a consultant on Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy. Holland's first original films brought her international acclaim: she captured a FIPRESCI at the Festival in Cannes for Provincial Actors (1978), and Fever was in the running for a Golden Bear at the Berlinale two years later. After making The Lonely Woman and the declaration of martial law, she decided to continue her career in the West (Angry Harvest, Europa, Europa, The Secret Garden) instead of returning to Poland. Her early style, which combined naturalism with poetry, which has often been described as cold, saturated with irony and anxiety, has evolved over time to become somewhat brighter. Although she continues to take on subjects related to the cruelty and paradoxes of the 20^th century, she is often able to extract something more optimistic from them. Having made films that have competed for Oscars, BAFTAs, and Golden Lions in Venice, she has, in recent years, been bringing renewed attention to the television series (including Ekipa, Treme, and Burning Bush).