Refocus: The Films of Agnieszka Holland

The Films of Agnieszka Holland is the first monograph devoted to the internationally most famous Polish filmmaker, a three times Oscar nominee and the recipient of numerous film festival prizes. It examines her rich, original oeuvre, which ranges from Holocaust dramas such as Europa, Europa (1990) to episodes of the HBO series The Wire. In examining the multifaceted nature of Holland’s authorship, the study situates her work in the context of art, popular, national, European, Hollywood, transnational, women’s, and queer cinema, as well as global television projects. Her colourful public persona oscillates among auteur, celebrity director, and political activist in an extraordinary professional trajectory, which started in the Eastern Bloc, continued in Western Europe and North America, then backtracked to a unified Europe. That zigzagged route conveys the unique nature of Holland’s career while epitomising the transformations of post-Cold War cultural production.

Elżbieta Ostrowska is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Audiovisual Media at the University of Lódź, Poland. Her publications include Women in Polish Cinema, co-authored with Ewa Mazierska (2006), the co-edited volumes The Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia. Between Pain and Pleasure (with Ewa Mazierska and Matilda Mroz) and The Cinema of Roman Polanski. Dark Spaces of the World. Her articles about film in have appeared in publications such as Slavic Review, Studies in European Cinema and Feminist Encounters.