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Edits and Additions to Holland's Early Life, Family and Education
Agnieszka Holland’s work is commonly known as a reflection of her split cultural heritage. She was raised in a un-religious home. Her father, Henryk Holland, lost his parents in a ghetto during the Holocaust, and spent most of his adult life denying his own Jewishness. Holland’s mother, Irene, was born and raised Catholic and righteously aided many Jews during the Holocaust, receiving the righteous among nations award from the Yad Vashem institute in Israel. Agnieszka was born in 1948. The year Stalinism took hold in Poland. When she was eleven, her parents, whose marriage had been continuously contentious divorced and her mother soon remarried a Jewish journalist, Stanislaw Brodski. In 1961, when Agnieszka was thirteen, her father died under extremely suspicious circumstances. He had been arrested and held captive by secret police under the accusation that he had committed treason. On the day he died, he was being interrogated by these police and fell out of a window. Though his interrogators said that he fell accidentally, his family remained confident that he had been pushed.

·     Quote from Holland’s younger sister: “ I have a feeling my father was killed, Like Agnieszka, he could be hated by somebody because he wwas very volatile, very dangerous”

·     Her mother did not tell Agnieszka about her mothers death at first, she discovered it by picking up a newspaper

·     By the time Holland entered film school in 1966, anti Semitism was raging in Poland. The nation’s best film school in Lodz would not allow Holland to attend, so she instead went to film school in Prague.

o   She describes Prague Spring: it was not like a political movement; it was like an artistic happening in its joyousness. It was my most optimistic and afterword, my most pessimistic moment

o   In 1970, Holland was arrested for her involvement in underground activity and spent six weeks in jail in Prague

o   She witnessed a relationship between the people in the cells on either side of her, where she had to be a sexual in between, communicating messages from one to the other

o   “Agnieszka is allergic to any notion of political correctness. She loves to puncture the prevailing orthodoxy. When she’s among Poles, she defends the Jews. And When she’s among Jews, she defends the Poles”

·     When she returned to Poland in 1971, she worked with the country’s leading filmmaker Andrezej Wajda, but every screenplay of her own that she submitted to Communist authorties was rejected

o   This was due to her last name and the anti-Semitism in the country

o   Wajda offered to adopt her, she also could have take n the name of the man she married in prague but declined all the options

·     Her contributions to Wajda’s 1977 epic “Man of Marble” were accepted, but her name was kept off of the credits

·     The Polish government banned all of Holland’s early films shortly after their release because they depicted in some way, a person trying to extract themselves from oppression

·     In 1981, martial law was imposed in Poland and Holland, who was out of the country at the time, was forced into exile in France

o   During this time, she was forced to live in a country where she did not know any of the language, and was separted from her nine year old daughter

o   There were no means of communication so the two were not even able to speak

o   This went on for 8 months, and though she was safe, Holland was not able to achieve any commercial success

§ The French denounced her depictions of the Holocaust, and Calude Lanzmann the director of Shoah was extremely vocal about his distaste for her work

o   “Holland clings to the world as she sees it. A world in which wisdom, if it exists at all, lies in accepting the violence and human fraility in everyone, without exception” including Jewish people.

Sources

“Between Prague Spring and French May | Berghahn Books.” Edited by Martin KIimke et al., BERGHAHN BOOKS : Between Prague Spring And French May, www.berghahnbooks.com/title/KlimkeBetween.

Cohen, Roger. “Holland Without a Country.” The New York Times Magazine, 1993.

Everett, Wendy. “Introuction .” European Identity in Cinema, Intellect, 2005.

Holland, Agnieszka. “Interview with Agnieszka Holland.” Film Quarterly, vol. 52, no. 2, 1998, pp. 2–9., doi:10.2307/1213268.

Kempley, Rita. “Agnieszka Holland: A War on Stupidity; Polish-Born Director of `Washington Square' Faces Off Against the Mindless Moviemaking Machine.” The Washington Post, 12 Oct. 1997, www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-752209.html?refid=easy_hf.

Miklica, Tomas. “Exiled, Then Exalted: Agnieszka Holland on Communist Censorship, the Holocaust, House of Cards and Spoor.” MovieMaker Magazine, 17 Apr. 2017, www.moviemaker.com/archives/moviemaking/directing/agnieszka-holland-febiofest/.

Article Evaluation : Nancy Meyers
The Wikipedia article on Nancy Meyers is informative and un bias. It is organized into 6 sections and the section on her career is further organized by decade. Before any of the sections there is a small introduction that gives a brief summary of the article including a few very important facts about Meyers and three of her most famous films. This introduction would be very useful to someone who was looking for basic, easy to access information about her.

One of the best parts of Nancy Meyer's page is its filmography. Since Meyers has worked as a director, producer, and writer, the filmography includes a chart that shows every film she's worked on and notes which roles she took on in each one. It is clearly color coded and includes what awards the film was nominated for and/or won. Every film in the filmography is also linked to the film's own Wikipedia page which is very useful.

There are almost 50 references on the page and every one that I tried clicking on worked. Most of the sources come from entertainment publications such as Variety, reviews, interviews, and film databases like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB. The facts in the article are all properly cited and after checking a few with the articles they came from, it seemed as though the article was properly paraphrased.

The article is very up to date, it references her most recent project as the producer of a film her daughter directed that was released in late 2017. The only aspect of the article that does not have much written in it is the section about her personal life. It says who she was married to and when, and when they got divorced.

Something interesting I found on the talk page is that the article was listed as being of interest to a few "Wikiprojects". The page also says that the article was last edited in January of 2018 which confirms that it is up to date.