The Films of Agnieszka Holland is the first monograph devoted to the internationally most famous Polish filmmaker, a three times Oscar nominee and the recipient of numerous film festival prizes. It examines her rich, original oeuvre, which ranges from Holocaust dramas such as Europa, Europa (1990) to episodes of the HBO series The Wire. In examining the multifaceted nature of Holland's authorship, the study situates her work in the context of art, popular, national, European, Hollywood, transnational, women's, and queer cinema, as well as global television projects. Her colourful public persona oscillates among auteur, celebrity director, and political activist in an extraordinary professional trajectory, which started in the Eastern Bloc, continued in Western Europe and North America, then backtracked to a unified Europe. That zigzagged route conveys the unique nature of Holland's career while epitomising the transformations of post-Cold War cultural production.The Films of Agnieszka Holland is the first monograph devoted to the internationally most famous Polish filmmaker, a three times Oscar nominee and the recipient of numerous film festival prizes. It examines her rich, original oeuvre, which ranges from Holocaust dramas such as Europa, Europa (1990) to episodes of the HBO series The Wire. In examining the multifaceted nature of Holland’s authorship, the study situates her work in the context of art, popular, national, European, Hollywood, transnational, women’s, and queer cinema, as well as global television projects. Her colourful public persona oscillates among auteur, celebrity director, and political activist in an extraordinary professional trajectory, which started in the Eastern Bloc, continued in Western Europe and North America, then backtracked to a unified Europe. That zigzagged route conveys the unique nature of Holland’s career while epitomising the transformations of post-Cold War cultural production.

"Through close textual and contextual analyses (paying attention to production contexts and modes of circulation) of Holland’s films along the three intersecting axes of authorship, women’s cinema and transnational cinema, this study yields original insights that go far beyond a conventional auteur cinema approach. Based on meticulous research, Refocus: The Films of Agnieszka Holland traces the fragmented, hard-to-narrativize history of Eastern European fictional filmmaking." - The Janovics Center Award for Outstanding Humanities Research in Transnational Film and Theatre Studies

"Ostrowska’s book is a veritable scholarly monograph in the sense that it not only reports on Holland’s life and oeuvre but also carefully filters the material through various film studies frameworks. In doing so, the author not only sheds interpretative light on specific issues within Holland’s oeuvre but also meaningfully reinterprets the frameworks and theoretical approaches themselves." - Eastern European Screen Studies