Rabbit Garden | Agnieszka Holland

[BluBonnet]

Agnieszka Holland Prepares ‘Rabbit Garden,’ Based on the Rise and Fall of Jerzy Kosinski

Agnieszka Holland, the director of Oscar nominated films like “Angry Harvest,” “Europa Europa” and “In Darkness,” has a new project.

Holland, who latest film “Franz” will world premiere this fall, is working on a film about Polish novelist and Holocaust survivor Jerzy Kosiński, whose works include “The Painted Bird” and “Being There.”

The film, “Rabbit Garden,” is based on a script by Jamie Dawson, and is being produced by American Fred Bernstein, who was a producer on Holland’s “Green Border.”

The film centers on Kosiński at a time when his life and literary career unravelled after having the authenticity of his work called into question by two reporters from The Village Voice. He died by suicide in 1991 in New York City.

The son of Jewish parents in Poland, Kosiński had survived the Nazi occupation and Holocaust.

“At some point, the American journalists found out that he had used a ghost writer or ghost translator, and that when he had said that his book [‘The Painted Bird’] was autobiographical, it wasn’t exactly true. Anyway, they cancelled him,” Holland told Variety Monday at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, where she presented a trailer of “Franz.”

“And it is a question, you know, what is more important: the artistic truth or the literal truth? How easy it is to cancel somebody because he doesn’t fit into the rules.

“He committed suicide in 1991, exactly when I was promoting ‘Europa Europa’ in New York, and I met him on the last day of his life. It was a big, incredible rise and a very brutal fall. But at the same time, there is the mystery of why he killed himself. If it was because of that fall, or maybe it was because of the trauma of his childhood.”