Agnieszka Holland truly made her mark on the European film community, and recently here as well, with her 1984 film Angry Harvest (San Francisco Film Festival '86), a bitter wartime chamber piece for two fugitives-one political, one emotional. A Woman Alone is an earlier film that recently has been hailed by those who viewed it at the Rotterdam Film Festival '86 as equally powerful and absolutely stunning in its impact. The film deals with a woman, Irena (Maria Chwalibog), living with her son on the outskirts of Wroslaw in Solidarity-era Poland. She has divorced her drunken husband and works as a mail carrier, caring also for a dying relative whenever she can. Her existence is miserable-only her eight-year-old son lights up her world, and he is a reticent boy with problems of his own. The forty-year-old Irena meets a younger man, an injured miner living on his disability pension, and begins a love affair. But what begins hopefully shatters on their first physical encounter. The disappointment initiates a spiral that sends Irena out of the small world she has known and into the life of a fugitive, as the fascinating tale turns from agony to almost Hitchcockian suspense. This was Holland's last film before emigrating from Poland, where the film was eventually banned. In Poland she had worked as assistant director to Krysztof Zanussi and also directed Provincial Actors (1979) and Fever (1980). In France, Holland collaborated with Andrzej Wajda on Danton.