For six decades, Agnieszka Holland has been one of the most consistently daring, versatile, and political voices in global cinema. The Polish director and screenwriter has produced several dozen films that deal with everything from religion to immigration to gender identity to totalitarianism.
Learn more during the Agnieszka Holland Retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image from Friday, June 7, to Friday, June 21. And as a special treat, the multiple award winner will appear in person for post-film Q&As on June 20 and June 21.
Organized with the Polish Cultural Institute New York, the program features a diverse selection of Holland’s greatest work, including early, rarely screened gems to art-house darlings and recent films that show her ability to depict historical trauma and human struggle with sensitivity and compassion.
General admission is 15.
Here’s the schedule.
Provincial Actors on June 7 at 6:45 pm.
This powerful, claustrophobic study depicts the tensions and conflicts among the members of a minor theatrical troupe in a small town near Warsaw. 1979, 121 minutes. In Polish with English subtitles.
Fever on June 8 at 1:30 pm.
This 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. 1981, 122 minutes. In Polish with English subtitles.
A Lonely Woman on June 8 at 4 pm.
Holland’s last film made in her home country before she self-exiled to France is a thinly veiled critique of the communist system that was banned in Poland. In this powerful character portrait, a woman struggles to raise her eight-year-old son with little support in a small town. 1987, 92 minutes. In Polish with English subtitles.
Europa Europa on June 9 at 2 pm and June 20 at 7 pm with Holland in person.
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. 1990, 112 minutes. In German, Russian, Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish with English subtitles.
Washington Square on June 9 at 4:30 pm.
Holland’s adaptation of Henry James’s 1880 novel 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. A marvelously unsentimental Catherine, whose seemingly inevitable journey into spinsterhood is given relief by the pursuit of the dashing Morris Townsend, who may or may not be interested more in her dowry. 1997, 116 minutes.
In Darkness on June 14 at 6:30 pm.
Leopold Socha is a sewer worker and petty thief in Lvov, a Nazi-occupied city in Poland. He 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. 2011, 144 minutes. In Polish with English subtitles.
Spoor on June 15 at 6 pm.
In a village on the Czech-Polish border, retired civil engineer Janina, 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. 2017, 128 minutes. In Polish with English subtitles.
The Secret Garden on June 16 at 1 pm and June 21 at 4 pm with Holland in person.
The stubborn, sad, and recently orphaned Mary Lennox is cast out of her life in colonial India and sent to live with distant relatives in a gloomy English mansion. There, she finds herself exploring the shadows and crooks of an enormous house, unlocking its secrets and wonders. 1993, 101 minutes.
Mr. Jones on June 16 at 3 pm.
Set on the eve of World War II, this thriller concerns Hitler’s rise to power and Stalin’s Soviet propaganda machine pushing their “utopia” to the Western world. Ambitious young journalist Gareth Jones 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. 2019, 119 minutes.
Charlatan on June 16 at 5:30 pm.
Few true stories tread the line between good and evil as precariously as that of Jan Mikolášek, a 20th-century Czech herbal healer whose success masked a grim secret. 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, his contradictions are put under a microscope. 2020, 118 minutes.
All screenings are set for the Sumner M. Redstone Theater or the Celeste and Armand Bartos Screening Room at MoMI, which is located at 36-01 35 Ave. in Astoria’s Kaufman Arts District.
The Agnieszka Holland Retrospective is co-programmed by MoMI Curator of Film Eric Hynes and Polish Cultural Institute New York Film and Performing Arts Curator Tomek Smolarski.
Images: MoMI/Sony Pictures Classics (top) and Warner Bros (bottom)