WJFF Visionary Award: Agnieszka Holland

The WJFF’s Annual Visionary Award recognizes creativity and insight in presenting the full diversity of the Jewish experience through moving image. The 2017 honoree is Agnieszka Holland, who will join us for a special extended Q&A and Award ceremony. The award will be presented alongside a screening of her Oscar nominated film Angry Harvest.

Honoree:
Agnieszka Holland is a Polish film director and scriptwriter. She began her career working with Krzysztof Zanussi as an assistant director with Andrzej Wajda as her mentor. Her debut feature Provincial Actors (1978), was heralded as a leader of the “cinema of moral disquiet” movement, and won the International Critics Prize at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival. In 1981, after Marshall Law was instituted in Poland, Holland emigrated to France.

Among her impressive and prolific catalog of films made in the west, highlights include Angry Harvest (1985), Europa Europa (1990), and In Darkness (2011)—all of which were nominated for Academy Awards.

Holland is actively involved in TV production, having directed seminal episodes of major US TV series including The Wire, Treme, The Killing, and House of Cards. Her latest film, Spoor, premiered at the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival, where it was awarded the Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize.

About the Film:
Angry Harvest
This remarkable Academy Award-nominated film tells a compelling story of love and desire during World War II. Middle-aged, lonely farmer Leon (Armin Mueller-Stahl, Avalon) rescues Rosa, a young upper-class Jewish refugee, as she is fleeing the Nazis. While he nurses her back to health, their relationship gradually grows more intimate, but disintegrates into a cat-and-mouse power struggle as Leon’s mixed motives for hiding Rosa emerge.