Gorączka (Fever). 1981. Poland. Directed by Agnieszka Holland. Screenplay by Krzysztof Teodor Toeplitz. With Olgierd Lukaszewicz, Barbara Grabowska, Adam Ferency. North American premiere. In Polish; English subtitles. 116 min.
Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa, The Secret Garden, The Wire) has recently earned the violent condemnation of the fascists for her new film The Green Border, a humane and complex drama about Syrian refugees at the border of Ukraine and Poland. But Holland, who was the focus of a MoMA retrospective in 2008, has been a fearless voice of independent creativity for the entirety of her 50-year career. She and her family have been directly affected by her country’s history of Nazism, Communism, and anti-Semitism, at times in tragic ways, and her 1981 film Fever was banned (like her film A Lonely Woman that same year) even before martial law was declared in Poland and she was driven into exile. The film, about Polish anarchist resistance to Russian forces following the failed 1905 revolution, is treated in a manner worthy of Dostoevsky (as well as her own mentor, Andrzej Wajda), and remains a powerful study in political commitment and cowardice.
2K digital restoration courtesy Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych i Fabularnych.