The Cinema of Agnieszka Holland: Anger and Ethics uniquely combines academic film analysis, biographical detail and personal interviews with the filmmaker, conducted over the course of a year, to trace the development of Agnieszka Holland’s female characters and how they have been reshaped across half a century.

Piotrowska considers Holland’s distinctive and evolving vision of society, history, gender and family relationships, with particular attention to how the filmmaker’s own background has influenced this vision. The study engages with Freud’s notion of afterwardness, Marianne Hirsch’s concept of posthistory, and the author’s theorisations of female authorship and the figure of the “nasty woman” in cinema. Through detailed readings of six feature films, it highlights Holland’s extraordinary contribution to global film and television culture, and her movement from despair to a creative rage through collaborations and adaptations.

This original and insightful work will be essential reading for students and scholars of European and world cinema, feminism, gender studies, European history, filmmaking, authorship and applied psychoanalysis and ethics.

Here’s a short excerpt from the book:

“In this volume, I am interested in exploring Holland’s storytelling over the decades of her life and career: her move from killing off her rebellious characters like Irena [the main character in Kobieta Samotna (A Woman Alone), 1981], to letting them negotiate with Fate, as in Washington Square, Bitter Harvest, and others, to a point much later in her life and career she unapologetically lets them be “nasty” (Spoor, Green Border) and not only survive but thrive and change the patriarchal world they have lived in.”

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