Holland is also the only director to win the Golden Lions for Best Film at the Polish Film Festival (FPFF) in Gdynia four times over – for Fever (Gorączka, 1981), In Darkness (W ciemności, 2011), Mr. Jones (2019), and Green Border (Zielona granica, 2023); she was also awarded the festival’s Platinum Lions for Lifetime Achievement in 2021, highlighting in her acceptance speech her status as the first female recipient of this prize in the FPFF’s nearly 50-year history. Following the intense controversies around the release of Green Border (which made those around Spoor look tame indeed), she was chosen as Gazeta Wyborcza’s ‘Person of the Year’ for 2024 in recognition of both ‘artistic achievements and civic courage’.
Nonetheless, the discrepancy between international and Polish perceptions of Spoor does point to wider contrasts in appraisals of Holland’s work made ‘at home’ and those made abroad, where she may these days be far more readily and widely perceived as ‘a world cinema master.’ Elżbieta Ostrowska, in her new study of the filmmaker, finds the Polish press more receptive to Holland’s American output of the 1990s than US commentators and more attentive to those films’ affinities with European art cinema. But that perspective appears to have shifted somewhat in the intervening years and into the next generation of Polish critics, some of whom view Holland’s work less affirmatively.
The reasons for the evolving contrast are complex and may go beyond Holland’s specific case. After all, kneejerk negativity about contemporary Polish cinema (versus obedient praise of hyped American or Asian imports) is characteristic of certain Polish critics, seemingly born of a mixture of ‘cultural cringe’ and a tendency to harp on past glories. ‘I mean, has Holland actually made anything good since Europa, Europa?’ a Polish academic friend asked a few months ago, before having to admit, after some proposed examples, that most of the director’s work since then had passed him by. Holland’s sheer productivity may have left certain viewers playing catch-up. Still, it’s hard to imagine the worth of her work being questioned so casually in the US or the UK, where retrospectives of Holland’s films in the past decade – at BFI Southbank in London (2016) and at MoMI in New York (this year) – have been warmly received and where the critic and scholar Steve Vineberg, a renewed Holland devotee since Mr. Jones, has recently referred to the director’s ‘late-career renaissance’.
The enduring – or revived – international acclaim for Holland must also be due to the transnational scope and range of her filmmaking itself; Taubin’s description of her as a ‘world cinema master’ is significant in this sense. With her Polish-Jewish heritage and the diversity of her output (which has encompassed socially engaged contemporary and historical dramas, literary adaptations, biopics, remakes, and TV series), Holland defies simplistic categorisation both as a figure and in her filmography.