Agnieszka Holland - The Masterpieces of Polish Cinema (4-DVD)

The Masterpieces of Polish Cinema
Agnieszka Holland

Studio: SPI International
Number of disks: 4
Condition: Brand New, Sealed, Mint
Total time: 99 + 104 + 116 + 92  min minutes
Language version: Polish
Subtitles: English
Region: 2 (PAL). European or multi-system DVD player is required to see this DVD.

Content:

DVD 1

Zdjecia próbne (Screen Tests)

Plot: A film about a film being made by a group of young directors. Story is divided into three parts. The first follows Anka, a girl from a working- class family. She finishes school, plans to attend screen tests, and has her first love affair during the summer holidays. Her experience with a boy who wants to pass her to his buddy leaves an emotional scar. In the second segment the film follows Pawel, who leaves the children's home and wants to become a theatre actor. He joins a provincial amateur production where he has an affair with a married woman, the wife of his employer. In the final piece the two are found at the screen tests. They make to the final list and have an affair together. During the last screen test they are asked to improvise a scene, and Anka repeats exchanged between them the night before. That angers Pawel and he leaves.

DVD 2

Aktorzy prowincjonalni (Provincial Actors)

Plot: 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 ensemble senses opportunity to give the performance of his life. For young director everything is already set. The leading man, however, is not giving up and is trying to restore the role according to his view. His wife listens to his fears, complaints and frustrations, while resigning herself to a fading career in a puppet theatre. This fine comedy won the Fipresci award at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival.

DVD 3

Goraczka (The Fever)

Plot: The film is set in 1905, in a time of feverish revolutionary underground activity in Poland partitioned between three neighbors. All the characters are committed anarchists. The bomb maker puts an invention together to place it at the disposal of young inexperienced terrorists fighting against Tsarist oppression. The story follows the passing of this bomb from anarchist to anarchist as several attempts are made on the life of Tsarist governor general, until, at the end, it is effectively and harmlessly defused by a bomb expert. The presence of the bomb has a destroying effect on all of the Polish revolutionaries, they either die or breakdown. The film was banned almost immediately when martial law was imposed upon Poland in 1981. Slated for obscurity, the film attained worldwide attention when it was feted at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival, by which time Holland had moved to France.

DVD 4

Kobieta samotna ( A Woman Alone)

Plot: Irena (Maria Chwalibog) bears one burden each day as she delivers the mail and several others when she goes home to continuing penury after her divorce from an alcoholic husband. She also has the chore of caring for a dying relative, accomplished partly out of compassion and partly on the hope that she will inherit a little cash when the woman dies. Her son is the only bright spot in her existence, an existence they spend together in an unfurnished, rundown apartment with no running water and the noise of the trains traveling along the nearby track. Then one day she meets Jacek (Boguslaw Linda), an equally lonely bachelor, as she is delivering him his disability pension -- he is lame from a mining accident. It was hardly a planned occurrence. Irena faints as she hands the surprised Jacek his envelope, and the two kindred spirits have a shared understanding that grows when they continue to see each other. Irena becomes frustrated at times with her son, who has a tendency to get into trouble, and that situation gets worse instead of better. Then her boss tells her that her mail route may be taken away from her, and when her dying relative finally succumbs, Irena is not only left without an inheritance, but faced with a funeral bill. In desperation she steals the pensioners' money that she is supposed to deliver, puts her son in a boarding home, buys an old car to make a dash for West Berlin and gets ready to escape her home, her life, and her poverty. At this point, the story has shifted gears as it heads into a narrative warp that signals a surprise ending.

About the director:

Agnieszka Holland (born November 28, 1948) is an Academy Award and Golden Globe-nominated Polish film and TV director and screenwriter. Best recognized for her highly political contributions to Polish New Wave cinema, Holland ranks as one of Poland's most prominent filmmakers.

Holland graduated from the Prague Film and TV Academy (FAMU) in 1971. She began her career as an assistant director for the Polish film directors Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda, including Zanussi's 1973 film Illuminacja and Wajda's 1982 film Danton. Holland's first major film was Provincial Actors (Aktorzy Prowincjonalni, 1978), a chronicle of the tense backstage relations within a small town theater company that served as a metaphor for Poland's contemporary political situation. The film won the International Critics Prize at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival.

Holland only directed two more major films in Poland, Fever (Goraczka, 1980) and A Lonely Woman (Kobieta samotna, 1981), before emigrating to France, just before martial law was declared in Poland in December 1981. Holland received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film for her 1985 film Angry Harvest, a German production about a Jewish woman on the run in World War II.

Perhaps Holland's best-known and well-regarded film is Europa Europa (1991), based on the biography of Solomon Perel, a Jewish teenager who fled Germany for Poland following Kristallnacht in 1938. Upon the outbreak of World War II and the German invasion of Poland, Perel fled to the Soviet-occupied section of Poland. Later captured during the German invasion of Russia in 1941, Soloman convinced a German officer that he was German and found himself enrolled in the Hitler Youth. The film received a lukewarm reception in Germany and the German Oscar selection committee did not include the film as a submission for the 1991 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. However, it became one of the most successful German films released in the US, winning a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

A friend of the noted Polish writer and director, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Holland collaborated on the screenplay for his film, Three Colors: Blue. Like Kieslowski, Holland frequently examines issues of faith in her work.

In a 1988 interview, she said that although women were important in her films, feminism was not the central theme of her work. Rather she suggested that when she was making films in Poland under the communist regime, there was an atmosphere of cross-gender solidarity against censorship, which was seen as the main political issue.

Holland's later films include Olivier, Olivier (1992), The Secret Garden (1993), Total Eclipse (1995), Washington Square (1997), the HBO production Shot in the Heart (2001), Julia Walking Home (2001) and The Healer (2004). Her most recent film is Copying Beethoven (2006).

In 2004 she directed "Moral Midgetry" the eighth episode of the third season of HBO drama series The Wire. She returned in 2006 to direct the eighth episode of the fourth season "Corner Boys". Both episodes were written by acclaimed novelist Richard Price. Show runner David Simon credits producer Nina K. Noble for attracting Holland to the show through their association working on HBO movie Shot In The Heart.[10] Simon said that Holland was "wonderful behind the camera" and did an excellent job of staging the fight between Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell in "Moral Midgetry".

In 2007 she directed together with her sister Magdalena Lazarkiewicz and daughter Katarzyna Adamik the Polish political drama series Ekipa. She is currently on the faculty as filmmaker-in-residence at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.