Agnieszka Holland
is a Polish film and theater director and screenwriter. In 1971 she graduated from FAMU, a film school in Prague. She is the Polish translator of Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being. Her last film Spoor, based on the novel by Olga Tokarczuk, is the Polish candidate for the Award of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In February 2017, Agnieszka Holland received The Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize for Spoor. The award is given to the films that are perceived to open new perspectives in the art of film. Mrs. Holland accepted an offer to film a three-part drama for HBO about Jan Palach, who immolated himself in January 1969 to protest “normalization“ after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. The resulting miniseries, Burning Bush, has been shown in Poland and Germany and selected for a Special Presentation screening at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival.