Movies: Agnieszka Holland

In the winter of 1942-43, a Jewish family leaps from a train going through Silesia. They are separated in the woods, and Leon, a local peasant who's now a farmer of some wealth, discovers the woman, Rosa, and hides her in his cellar. Leon's a middle-...

Fourteen-year-old Jeremi is a YouTuber. His father works in a space agency and promised to show him a rocket launch, but plans changed at the eleventh hour, and he called off the trip. Instead, the teenager is sent to his grandpa in the countryside. ...

Irena, a postal delivery worker, is struggling with inadequate housing, a drunk neighbor who wants to take her place, and a heartless boss, knowing that the whole day at work, she is leaving her young son. But the worst is the loneliness, exacerbated...

The film is set in a small town near Warsaw, to which a young and coming director comes to produce a classic play (Wyspianski "Wyzwolenie") with a modern vein. Everyone in the production gets his usual stereotypical role, but the aging idol of the en...

In May of 1983, a man turns 49 and, with his 17-year old son, journeys to the village in Baden that he left 40 years before. He wants to discover what happened then, the truth about an affair his mother had with a young Polish prisoner of war, how th...

August 2015, a courtroom in Rostov-on-Don. A man is peering through the bars of his cage, his eyes reveal that his nerves are about to snap. Today he will be handed down a sentence to which he must submit: 20 years’ imprisonment in Siberia for terror...

Since childhood, Raquel and Maria have been close friends. Now all grown-up, Raquel has fulfilled her dream of becoming an actress, while Maria has married a handyman, given birth to three children and runs the family household. In the wake of the Ar...

Three-part film centered around a film being made by a group of young directors. In the first a working-class girl finishes school and has her first love affair, which ends badly. In the second a provincial boy with dreams of life in the theater has ...

The life of Franz Kafka in a series of independent chapters: from his birth in 19th-century Prague to his final years in Berlin and death in 1924, and his imagined future....

Gdańsk, Poland, September 1980. Lech Wałęsa and other Lenin shipyard workers found Solidarność (Solidarity), the first independent trade union behind the Iron Curtain. The long and hard battle to bring down communist dictatorship has begun....

Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz directed this insightful TV documentary (2005) tracing the Polish filmmaker's career. Former classmates reminisce about Kieslowski's happy beginnings at the Lodz film school and how his dissatisfaction with some of his early d...

The film is set in 1905, in a time of feverish revolutionary underground activity in Poland partitioned between three neighbours. All the characters are committed anarchists. The bomb maker puts an invention together to place it at the disposal of yo...

An epic exploration of the Czechoslovak New Wave cinema of the 1960s and 70s, structured around a series of conversations with one of its most acclaimed exponents - Closely Observed Trains director Jiří Menzel....

A few months before his death, Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda (1926-2016) revisited his work in an assembly room of the Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing, established in Warsaw in 2002....

A young couple who are unable to have children make a deal with a poor woman to buy her illegitimate child rather than wait through the time-consuming process of legal adoption....

Warsaw, December 13th 1981. Martial law shuts down the country. Overnight, a country turns into a prison. Taxis have been replaced by tanks. Citizens are treated like criminals. And visiting British Professor Joan Andrews finds herself trapped. After...

The film was inspired by one of the most important documentaries shot by Krzysztof Kieślowski, Talking Heads (1980). The director asked his interlocutors seemingly simple questions, such as “Who are you?” and “What do you want?”....

Shortly before his death, Marek Edelman (1919-2009), former commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943) against the Nazi occupation, wonders about several basic themes of human existence in relation to the Shoah: how was it possible to enjoy love,...

French Cinema Mon Amour is an ensemble film in which each contributor brings their own voice, their own particular approach, their culture, and their language to produce a portrait of French cinema....

Califia, the Queen and spirit of California, gives the audience a quick and somewhat romanticized look at history of California, as well as trials and tribulations, but also hopes and dreams of its various ethnicites and cultures....