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Agnieszka Holland is not one for heroes and villains. The Polish director has revisited the darkest power abuses of Europeâs last century throughout her career â depicting the Holocaust in Europa Europa (1991) and In Darkness (2011), and Soviet Ukraineâs Holodomor in Mr. Jones (2019) â with an emphasis not on ideological divisions but the capacity within every human, tested by high-stakes oppression, for both great integrity and the pettiest of cruelties.
A deep moral ambiguity drives psychological suspense, too, in Charlatan, her loosely inspired biopic of Jan Mikolášek, a herbalist persecuted by the Czechoslovak state. Regimes come and go in a film set in the communist 1950s that flashes back frequently to the Nazi-occupied 30s, but the pressure on citizens to bend thei