Freedom Lecture by Agnieszka Holland

For the seventh year in a row, De Balie is organising the Freedom Lecture, in which each year four speakers defend the idea of freedom, democracy and resistance. Just like last year, one of the lectures is organised at and with IFFR, this time with the Polish director Agnieszka Holland, who will focus on the urgent question of what Europe is now facing in art and politics.

Agnieszka Holland is chairwoman of European Film Academy. She learnt the craft of filmmaking in Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s and, when she returned to her homeland, she worked as assistant to directors Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda. Since her debut in 1973, she has tended to make politically committed work, both in Europe and America. In her films, such as the Oscar-nominated Europa Europa (1990) and In Darkness (2011), she portrays dramatic episodes from European history, and in her recent TV series 1983, she shows that even now, in her own words, "authoritarianism still hasn’t disappeared from Europe". The Freedom Lecture is an initiative of De Balie and is made possible by the Stichting Democratie en Media and vfonds.