Agnieszka Holland


‘Life under real communism was threatening, but we learned to circumvent the system.’ Soviet tanks in Prague in 1968. Photograph: Libor Hajsky/AFP/Getty Images

When at the age of 15 I decided that I would one day become a film director, film seemed to be living up to Lenin’s famous definition as “the most important of the arts”. It was the mid-1960s and arthouse cinema was at its peak, with such incredible personalities as Ingmar Bergman, Alain Resnais, Federico Fellini, Carol Reed, Andrzej Wajda and Akira Kurosawa. They were all bound by a single shared experience: each, as grown, mature people, had lived through the atrocities of the second world war, even if for some of them it had not been that immediate. The experience of war provided them with a feeling of responsibility for what kind of stories they told and what formal choices they made, and an awareness that the world was infinitely complicated, that people were capable of absolutely anything.…  Seguir leyendo »