Museum of the Moving Image and Polish Cultural Institute New York co-present retrospective of Agnieszka Holland

June 7–21, 2024: Holland in person with Europa Europa on June 20 and The Secret Garden on June 21

Julie Delpy and Marco Hofschneider in Europa Europa

New York, New York, May 28, 2024 — For six decades, Agnieszka Holland has been one of the most consistently daring, versatile, and politically committed voices in global cinema. From June 7–21, on the eve of the U.S. release of her latest film Green Border, Museum of the Moving Image and the Polish Cultural Institute New York will pay tribute to the internationally renowned director with a diverse selection of her greatest work, including early, rarely screened gems and recent films that show her undimmed ability to depict historical trauma and human struggle with sensitivity and compassion. 
 
The retrospective will feature initial work made in Poland, including Provincial Actors, Fever, and A Woman Alone; her triumph in the 1990s as an art-house darling with the sensations Europa Europa and The Secret Garden, her delightful adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic children’s novel; and her increasingly bold dramas of present-day political resistance, like Spoor and In Darkness.
 
Holland will appear in person for post-film Q&As on June 20 with Europa Europa and June 21 with The Secret Garden (both films screen in 35mm).
 
The series is co-programmed by MoMI Curator of Film Eric Hynes and Tomek Smolarski, Film and Performing Arts Curator, Polish Cultural Institute New York.
 
Green Border opens June 21 at Film Forum in New York, released by Kino Lorber.

Schedule and descriptions are included below and available online at movingimage.org/series/holland.
 
SCHEDULE FOR AGNIESZKA HOLLAND, JUNE 7–21, 2024
All screenings take place at Museum of the Moving Image in the Sumner M. Redstone Theater or the Celeste and Armand Bartos Screening Room, 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria, NY, 11106. More information at movingimage.org.
 
Provincial Actors
Friday, June 7, 6:45 p.m.
Dir. Agnieszka Holland. 1979, 121 mins. Poland. In Polish with English subtitles. DCP. With Tadeusz Huk, Halina Labonarska. Holland first gained early recognition with this powerful, claustrophobic study of the tensions and conflicts amongst the members of a minor theatrical troupe in a small town near Warsaw. Provincial Actors employs Brechtian distancing devices to intensify an atmosphere and searingly explore her characters' predicaments. It’s a film that reflects Holland’s love of theater, abhorrence of censorship, ambiguity towards relationships, and overall mischievous sense of humor, all while avoiding the clichés of the backstage genre.
 
Fever
Saturday, June 8, 1:30 p.m.
Dir. Agnieszka Holland. 1981, 122 mins. Poland. In Polish with English subtitles. 2K restored DCP. With Olgierd Lukaszewicz, Barbara Grabowska, Adam Ferency. Holland's tense, gripping 1905-set drama depicts a group of underground Polish anarchists as they arm themselves and build bombs to resist the incoming Russian Tsarist oppression. Lead actress Grabowska won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 1981 Berlin International Film Festival for the film, yet the film was nevertheless banned in Poland after martial law was declared later that year. Fever was the second to last film Holland made in her home country before being exiled to France. 
 
A Woman Alone
Saturday, June 8, 4:00 p.m.
Dir. Agnieszka Holland. 1987, 92 mins. Poland. In Polish with English subtitles. DCP. With Maria Chwalibóg, Bogusław Linda, Paweł Witczak. Holland’s last film made in her home country before she self-exiled to France is a thinly veiled critique of the communist totalitarian system that was banned in Poland. In this powerful character portrait, a woman (a brilliant performance by Chwalibóg) struggles to raise her eight-year-old son with little support in a small town. This nuanced, finely crafted film is a quietly startling vision of communist government bureaucracy, detailing its stifling impact on the daily lives of the community and individual.
 
Europa Europa
Saturday, June 9, 2:00 p.m.
Thursday, June 20, 7:00 p.m. With Agnieszka Holland in person
Dir. Agnieszka Holland. 1990, 112 mins. 35mm. Germany, France, Poland. In German, Russian, Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish with English subtitles. 35mm. With Marco Hofschneider, Julie Delpy, Hanns Zischler. Holland received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for this intensely dramatized, brilliantly acted account of the real-life experiences of Solomon Perel, a German Jew who, at age 16, concealed his Jewishness, first as a Stalinist in a Soviet orphanage then as an interpreter for the German army, and finally as an enlistee in the Hitler Youth. This World War II drama, which complexly yet sensitively details the derangement of identity during times of evil, became an international art-house sensation, officially setting the stage for Holland’s international ascendance.
 
In Darkness
Friday, June 14, 6:30 p.m.
Dir. Agnieszka Holland. 2011, 144 mins. Poland. In Polish with English subtitles. DCP. With Robert Więckiewicz, Benno Fürmann, Agnieszka Grochowska, Maria Schrader, Herbert Knaup, Kinga Preis, Krzysztof Skonieczny. Leopold Socha, a sewer worker and petty thief in Lvov, a Nazi-occupied city in Poland, encounters a group of Jews trying to escape the liquidation of the ghetto and agrees to hide them in exchange for money in the town’s labyrinthine sewers. As the enterprise begins to affect Socha’s conscience, what starts out as a straightforward and cynical business arrangement becomes an unlikely alliance. Based on a true story, In Darkness is an extraordinary tale of survival, set across 14 tense, increasingly dangerous months.
 
Spoor
Saturday, June 15, 6:00 p.m.
Dir. Agnieszka Holland. 2017, 128 mins. Poland. In Polish with English subtitles. DCP. With Agnieszka Mandat, Jakub Gierszal, Wiktor Zborowski, Miroslav Krobot, Patricia Volny. In Polish with English subtitles. A film Holland has called an “anarchist, feminist, eco-thriller,” the brilliant and absorbing Spoor won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. In a village on the Czech-Polish border, retired civil engineer Janina (Mandat), who loves her dogs like they’re her children, is repulsed by the hunters who run the town. When her beloved dogs go missing, she becomes more determined to dismantle the architecture that allows the poachers to kill animals with impudence. Spoor is adapted from the best-selling novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Nobel Prize–winning author Olga Tokarczuk, who is also the film’s cowriter. 
 
The Secret Garden
Sunday, June 16, 1:00 p.m.
Friday, June 21, 4:00 p.m. With Agnieszka Holland in person
Dir. Agnieszka Holland. 1993, 101 mins. United States. 35mm. With Kate Maberly, Maggie Smith, Heydon Prowse, Andrew Knott, John Lynch, Irène Jacob. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic children’s novel comes to precious life in Holland’s exquisitely mounted gothic adaptation, one of the finest live-action family films of the nineties. Maberly unsentimentally plays the stubborn, sad Mary Lennox, who, after being suddenly orphaned, is cast out of her life in colonial India and sent to live with distant relatives at a gloomy English mansion. There, she finds herself exploring the shadows and crooks of the enormous house, unlocking its secrets and wonders. Perfectly evoking the magic of one of the most cherished books of all time, Holland’s beautifully mounted film features a marvelous score by Zbigniew Preisner and evocative cinematography by Roger Deakins.
 
Mr. Jones
Sunday, June 16, 3:00 p.m.
Dir. Agnieszka Holland. 2019, 119 mins. U.K./Poland/Ukraine. DCP. With James Norton, Vanessa Kirby, Peter Sarsgaard. Set on the eve of WWII, Holland’s thriller concerns Hitler’s rise to power and Stalin’s Soviet propaganda machine pushing their “utopia” to the Western world. It's at this time that ambitious young journalist Gareth Jones (Norton) travels to Moscow to uncover the truth behind the propaganda, receiving a tip that could expose an international conspiracy that could cost him and his informant their lives. Jones’s journey to uncover this truth would later inspire George Orwell’s book Animal Farm. 
 
Charlatan
Sunday, June 16, 5:30 p.m.
Dir. Agnieszka Holland. 2020, 118 mins. Poland. DCP. With Ivan Trojan, Josef Trojan, Juraj Loj, Jaroslava Pokorná. Few true stories tread the thin line between good and evil as precariously as that of Jan Mikolášek, a 20th-century Czech herbal healer whose great success masked the grimmest of secrets. Mikolášek won fame and fortune treating celebrities of the interwar, Nazi, and Communist eras with his uncanny knack for “urinary diagnosis.” But his passion for healing came from the same source as a lust for cruelty, sadism, and an incapacity for love that only one person—his assistant, František—could ever quell. As a show trial threatens to reveal these secrets, Jan’s contradictions are put under a microscope, with the fate of his only love hanging in the balance. Charlatan is a twist-filled personal story as well as a reflection on the price one can pay for single-mindedly following one’s calling.