Green Border (Zielona granica) with Agnieszka Holland

Based on the life of German-speaking Jewish-Czech modernist author Franz Kafka, who died in 1924 at 40 after publishing three novels and a handful of short stories and parables, Franz was a natural story for Holland to adapt into a film: she read his famous Metamorphosis when she was 14 and felt “since that time, Kafka is my brother” (Screen Daily). Wanting to give the character “light—and some punk infusion,” Holland takes a playful approach to the author’s idiosyncratic personality through “some kind of biography” that she hopes appeals to young people who might not be familiar with this man who has been written about far more voluminously than he was able to write for himself.

Inspired by the memoirs of Solomon Perel, a German Jew who evaded Nazi persecution by joining their ranks, Holland’s WWII–era biopic offers " new immediacy to the outrage by locating specific, wrenching details that transcend cliché" (New York Times). Nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 64th Oscars—the film was shut out of the then-named Foreign Language Film category when Germany refused to nominate it for its thematic content—Holland’s complicated work investigates ways that denial and untruths can lead to irrepressible personal, generational, and cultural anguish. 

Just after Agnieszka Holland completed film school in Prague, Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, already an established and celebrated auteur for films like Ashes and Diamonds (1958), welcomed the young aspirant to visit his set of The Wedding (1973). Over time, Holland said, “our relation moved from ‘master–pupil’ to something much more equal in collaboration and friendship,” and she started to write scripts with him. One of their most meaningful collaborations was this 1990 biopic about the extraordinary Polish-Jewish humanitarian Janusz Korczak, remembered “for his pedagogical philosophy and his heroic actions during the Holocaust,” Holland told the BFI. With stunning cinematography by Robby Müller (Dead Man, 1995), Korczak is, as Steven Spielberg once wrote, "one of the most important European pictures about the Holocaust."