A DIRECTOR WHO MIXES CULTURES

Agnieszka Holland, a Polish screenwriter and director, is sitting in a Japanese restaurant called Tango in Manhattan sipping a sake martini. As if this cultural mix weren’t provocative enough, she lives in Paris and is best known in the United States for “Angry Harvest”--a German movie that was one of last year’s nominees for the best foreign-language film Oscar.

She is in New York for New Directors/New Films, the annual series co-sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, where she is presenting “A Woman Alone.” What makes this remarkable is that her film--although made for Polish television in 1981--has never been shown officially in Poland; indeed, the print reached her illegally and cannot be released commercially.

“Someone in the Polish underground thought it was a shame that ‘A Woman Alone’ was languishing on the shelf and got a copy to me in Paris,” says the 38-year-old director. “It was first shown at the Rotterdam Festival, then the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, and it won a prize at the Festival of New Cinema in Montreal.”

The reason for this censorship has to do with timing: It was during the heyday of Solidarity, the now-outlawed labor union, that Holland made her bleak portrait of a contemporary woman trying to survive economically and emotionally. But when it was completed, the imposition of martial law consigned this drama to the shelf.

Holland happened to be outside Poland at this time; because of her vocal support of Solidarity, she realized she could not return to her country without encountering problems. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to make films there,” she recalls, and consequently the director began the life of an exile.

Curiously enough, “A Woman Alone” has been seen by a few hundred thousand Poles because of an underground video circuit. “There are many films like this--including Ryszard Bugalsky’s ‘Interrogation’--which cannot be seen in Polish theaters, but have a life through VCRs,” says the director.

“I have the moral right to show my own film, but not the legal right to show it commercially,” Holland says in a mixture of Polish and English. “Distributors have written to PolTel (Polish television) about the film, but have received no response. They don’t want to sell it at the moment. So it can be shown only at festivals.”

This might be daunting if Holland were not already embarked on another project. She has lined up Richard Dreyfuss and Christopher Lambert for her first English-language film, a drama about the assassination of the Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko in 1984.

“It’s not a docudrama,” she explains, “but a psychological reconstruction of the murderer (Dreyfuss) and the priest (Lambert)--a kind of Cain and Abel story. It will be shot in France, with Columbia distributing internationally.”

Working from her own script, Holland is preparing what she terms “the first film I’m making with the American audience in mind. The story is personal for me, but I translated it to such a degree--not only linguistically, but emotionally--that it can touch anyone.”