Two-Time Oscar-Nominated Director Agnieszka Holland Named
2005 Robert L. Hess Scholar in Residence at Brooklyn College

Director Agnieszka Holland, 2005 Robert L. Hess Scholar in Residence at Brooklyn College

Agnieszka Holland, acclaimed Polish director of such films as The Secret Garden (1993), Europa, Europa (1990) and the forthcoming Copying Beethoven (2006), will be the Robert L. Hess Scholar in Residence at Brooklyn College for the week of November 14 through 18. The Robert L. Hess Scholar in Residence Program, established in 1992, brings prominent figures to campus to teach and meet with Brooklyn College students and faculty. Hess Scholars have included historian and former Brown University President Vartan Gregorian, Columbia University cultural historian Ann Douglas, and New York University historian and cultural critic Robin D.G. Kelley. The program serves as a permanent tribute to the scholarly commitment of Robert L. Hess, exemplified during his tenure as president of Brooklyn College from 1979 to 1992.

Holland, born in 1948, is the daughter of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father who died in 1961 under mysterious circumstances while in the custody of the Polish secret police. She studied at the Czech Film Academy in Prague with Milos Forman and Ivan Passer. During her time in Czechoslovakia she joined the student crusade to bring about "socialism with a human face" and spent six weeks in prison in 1970. She began her film career in Poland, where she worked with the great Polish filmmaker, Andrzej Wajda. Angry Harvest (1986), a World War II story of a Polish farmer who shelters a Jewish refugee, brought her first Oscar nomination for best foreign film. Many of her subsequent films have dealt with issues of faith, nationality, and authority. She is perhaps best known for Europa, Europa (1990), the story of a young German Jew who passes as an Aryan in order to survive and ends up in the Nazi army, which won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination in 1991. She has recently finished the principal photography on Copying Beethoven, a period drama about the relationship between the great German composer (played by Ed Harris) and Anna Holtz (Diana Kruger), the woman who prepared fair copies of his scribbled scores during the time he was composing his Ninth Symphony.

At Brooklyn College Ms. Holland will teach a master class in directing, an acting workshop, and participate in numerous discussions and classroom sessions about filmmaking, writing for the screen, women in film, anti-Semitism, and the treatment of the Holocaust in film. On Tuesday, November 15 at 5:30 p.m. in the Woody Tanger Auditorium of the Brooklyn College Library, she will give the Robert L. Hess Memorial Lecture on "The Limits of Freedom: Making Films under Communism and the ‘Free Market’ Economy.” As a filmmaker whose films have been banned in her native country and who chose self-imposed exile as martial law was declared there in 1981, Ms. Holland’s caustic and cynical take on the current state of the motion picture industry will be surprising to some. She recently observed that the cinema is showing signs of dementia, and has theorized that the decline of quality in Hollywood films since the 1980s is due to the effects of globalization, which has resulted in a loss of authentic American identity in films from major American studios.

A number of events related to Ms. Holland’s residency at Brooklyn College are open to the public. On Tuesday, November 8, there will be a free screening of Washington Square (1997, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Albert Finney) in Whitman Hall at 1:30 p.m. On Wednesday, November 9, there will be a free screening of the director's Academy Award-nominated feature Europa, Europa (1990) at 6 p.m. in Whitman Hall. On Monday, November 14, there will be a free screening of Total Eclipse (1995), at 6 p.m. in Whitman Theater. Set in Bohemian Paris, Total Eclipse is the story of poet Arthur Rimbaud (played by Leonardo DiCaprio). Ms. Holland will answer questions from the audience following the screening. On Tuesday, November 15, there will be a free screening of Secret Garden (1997) at 1:30 p.m. in the Tanger Auditorium in the Brooklyn College Library. The Secret Garden, that rare family movie that is both a critical and commercial triumph, enlisted Francis Ford Coppola as executive producer and was Holland’s first Hollywood film. The Hess Memorial Lecture on Tuesday, November 15 at 5:30 p.m. is also free and open to the public. For more information about events, please call the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, (718) 951-5847.

Gracious thanks to LOT Polish Airlines for their generous support of the travel arrangements for Ms. Holland.