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Several times Oscar nominee, and winner of a Golden Globe for the film Europe, Europe. Her internationally acclaimed miniseries Burning Bush (2013) commemorated the period that followed shortly after Jan Palach, a student at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts, set himself on fire on Wenceslas Square on 16 January, 1969, to rouse the public from the resignation into which it had begun to sink after the August 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia. On the eve of the 57th anniversary of Palach’s act, Polish director and screenwriter Agnieszka Holland received the Charles IV Prize, jointly awarded by Charles University and the City of Prague, at the Old Town Hall in Prague.
Prague Mayor Bohuslav Svoboda, filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, and CU Rector Milena Králíčková (left to right).
The Charles IV Prize is awarded by both institutions every two years to individuals who have achieved European significance through their cultural, scientific, or political work and contributed to the positive development of contemporary civilisation. This year, its recipient is the famous filmmaker, honoured for her “lifetime artistic work devoted to issues of historical memory, experiences from the period of totalitarian regimes, and the defense of fundamental human rights and democratic values in an international context.” The first recipient of this award in 1993 was French philosopher Paul Ricoeur.
The Charles IV Award was presented to the filmmaker by Charles University Rector Milena Králíčková and Mayor of Prague Bohuslav Svoboda. “The City of Prague is proud to be a co-founder of this award together with Charles University. We see it as an expression of our shared commitment to supporting values that are essential for a functioning society—freedom of thought, bravery, dialogue, and respect for the truth. I am convinced that this year’s laureate fully embodies these ideals,” stated Bohuslav Svoboda.
His words were echoed by Milena Králíčková, Rector of Charles University: “Her work is internationally renowned. She is deeply human and socially engaged. In her films, she consistently explores issues of freedom, responsibility, power, memory, and personal courage. Her life and career are closely linked to Central Europe and its dramatic history. Her experience with totalitarian rule, its mechanisms, and its consequences has become one of the defining aspects of her work. Whether she returns to the past or reflects on the present in her films, she always does so with a deep sense for truth, empathy, and moral complexity. Agnieszka Holland does not offer simple answers in her works; her films raise often uncomfortable but all the more necessary questions about individual guilt and responsibility, the limits of compromise, and the price of freedom. It is precisely this that allows her work to transcend the boundaries of art and become an important voice in public debate,” emphasised Milena Králíčková.
Agnieszka Holland accepted the Charles IV Prize in the Brožík Hall of Prague’s Old Town Hall with gratitude and joy. She stressed that receiving the award in Prague was of exceptional personal significance to her. In her speech, she sharply condemned the actions of the current world ruling elites, who, in order to maintain their own power and comfort, are reducing international law, the rule of law, human rights, and freedom into empty concepts. In her speech, she recalled her 2019 film Mr. Jones, which returns to the 1930s, when Welsh journalist Gareth Jones arrives in Ukraine, tormented by Stalinist terror and an artificially induced famine that cost millions of lives. Although Jones bore witness to the horrors unfolding in Ukraine, the Western world refused to believe him.
“In a world where corrupt media are driven not by facts but by political or ideological agendas, where politicians rule through fear, convenience, and the desire to hold on to power, and where an indifferent society is primarily concerned with its own comfort, anything can happen and everything goes unpunished. People are willing to give up their humanity, respect for others, humanistic or Christian values, just to maintain their comfort. It always ends the same way: when they give up their values, they ultimately lose the comfort they wanted to protect. We made this film several years after the annexation of Crimea and the Russian attacks on Donbas, and several years before the full-scale invasion of sovereign Ukraine by the Russian army. It was created as a warning, updating mechanisms known from the interwar period. It speaks of democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and international law as values worth defending, and that people like Gareth Jones, who ultimately paid for their courage with their lives, can be both a model and a challenge for us. However, this hope is disappearing at an extraordinary rate today,” warned Agnieszka Holland.
The way individuals are affected by the totalitarian regimes in which they lead their lives is one of the key themes that runs through Agnieszka Holland's work. Among her most acclaimed works are Angry Harvest, Europe, Europe, and In Darkness, which return to the World War II period. In the film Charlatan, starring Ivan Trojan in the leading role, she tells the story of Czechoslovak herbalist and healer Jan Mikolášek, who was convicted in a sham trial in the 1950s.
Recently, she sparked a major public debate with her film Green Border, which deals with very contemporary events—namely, the refugee crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border in 2021 and 2022. For this film, she received a Special Jury Prize at the 2023 Venice Film Festival.
Agnieszka Holland also has experience with major Hollywood productions, having directed several episodes of the acclaimed series House of Cards. In the mid-1990s, she filmed Total Eclipse, a powerful drama following the lives and turbulent love affair of poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. Under her direction, the cursed poets were played by David Thewlis and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Holland has a very close relationship with Prague, which she developed while studying at FAMU in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She has been returning to this country ever since, including with her work. She has also shot several of her works in the buildings of Charles University, most recently the major co-production feature Franz about the writer Franz Kafka, which Poland entered into the competition for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film last year. In it, viewers could, among other, see the Faculty of Law of Charles University, which played the role of the insurance company for which Franz Kafka worked for most of his professional life.
During the award ceremony, Agnieszka Holland also signed the memorial book of the City of Prague.
The Faculty of Arts of Charles University then starred as itself in the series Burning Bush, in which the filmmaker returned to the period immediately following Jan Palach’s self-immolation. The iconic building of CU ARTS, on what is now Jan Palach Square, was the setting for such powerful moments in the series as when, at the end of the first episode, a group of student representatives remove the bust of V. I. Lenin from its pedestal on the main staircase of the faculty and replace it with a death mask of Jan Palach, created by sculptor Olbram Zoubek. Today, a statue of T. G. Masaryk stands in this place, and a replica of Jan Palach’s death mask is part of a memorial plaque located on the outside of the building. Every year, on the anniversary of Jan Palach’s self-immolation, 16 January, people gather there to commemorate his legacy.
The first episode of Burning Bush even had its world premiere at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in 2013, attended by Agnieszka Holland herself and screenwriter Štěpán Hulík, a graduate of CU ARTS and FAMU.
Agnieszka Holland’s very close relationship with Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic was also confirmed two years ago when President Petr Pavel awarded her the Czech Medal of Merit, First Grade, in the field of culture.
Story by: Helena Zdráhalová
Photos by: Hynek Glos