Provincial Actors  

Friday, June 7 at 6:45 PM 

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 at 1:30 PM 

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 at 4:00 PM

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 individuals.  

Europa Europa  

Sunday, June 9 at 2:00 PM

Thursday, June 20 at 7:00 PM with Agnieszka Holland in person 

Dir. Agnieszka Holland. 1990, 112 mins. 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 Salomon 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 enlisted 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.  

Washington Square

Sunday, Jun 9 at 4:30 PM

Dir. Agnieszka Holland. 1997, 116 mins. United States. Archival 35mm print. With Jennifer Jason Leigh, Albert Finney, Ben Chaplin, Maggie Smith, Judith Ivey. Holland’s earthy, deeply felt adaptation of Henry James’s 1880 novel (which had been famously adapted by William Wyler into the 1949 film The Heiress) is a faithful evocation of James’s prose, as well as the time, place, mood, and feeling of its New York setting, though shot in Baltimore (where she would later shoot episodes of The Wire). Exquisitely shot and acted, Washington Square casts a marvelously unsentimental Leigh as Catherine, whose seemingly inevitable journey into spinsterhood is given relief by the pursuit of the dashing Morris Townsend (Chaplin), who may or may not be interested more in her dowry. The film is shot through with Jamesian ambiguity and Holland’s contemporary feminist outlook. 

In Darkness  

Friday, June 14 at 6:30 PM

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 at 6:00 PM

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 at 1:00 PM

Friday, June 21, 4:00 PM 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 at 3:00 PM 

Dir. Agnieszka Holland. 2019, 119 mins. U.K./Poland/Ukraine. DCP. With James Norton, Vanessa Kirby, Peter Sarsgaard. Set on the eve of world 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 PM

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.   

Agnieszka Holland, born on November 28, 1948, is a renowned Polish film and television director and screenwriter. Over six decades, Holland has established herself as one of global cinema’s most daring, versatile, and politically committed voices. She is best known for her films Europa Europa (1990), for which she received a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, The Secret Garden (1993), Angry Harvest (1985), and the Holocaust drama In Darkness (2011), the last two of which were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 2017, Holland received the Alfred Bauer Prize (Silver Bear) at the Berlin International Film Festival for her film Spoor (2017). In 2020, she was elected President of the European Film Academy. Most recently, her film Green Border (2023) won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival.