Europa Europa in 35mm with Agnieszka Holland

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, Holland’s “angry and urgent masterpiece” (The Guardian) centers around the 2021 migrant crisis that unfolded in the exclusion zone between Poland and Belarus. Named for the swamplands that cover the region, Holland’s impactful narrative was conceived by reflecting on actual events, using interviews with real border guards and refugees to inform the four interwoven stories that supply the work with its incredible emotional depth. Made with trusted collaborators, including cinematographer Tomasz Naumiuk and co-writer Gabriela Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko, Green Border insists on depicting regional upheaval and conflict by prioritizing its human impact.

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.

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."