In fact, Holland would invert this reading: it was her attraction to American cinema that informed her storytelling from the beginning. “In my youth, when I started to think about making movies, I was always closer to European than American cinema. American cinema was attractive to me but not so close. What made me closer to American cinema, I realised, was my way of storytelling, which is pretty clear and linear and efficient. Americans are sensitive to this narrative skill, but for some European critics it was too foreign. It’s why I think they started to invite me to go there and gave me some interesting projects.”

I question the extent to which her pragmatism is informed by an increasing dependence, as a filmmaker, on European and international co-productions. Does she feel particularly or consciously Polish in these situations? “European co-productions are necessary, I think, because it’s very difficult to finance a film if it’s a little bigger and from only one country and one source. With the Czechs it’s quite special. I feel a little Czech because I graduated from the film school in Prague. Czech cinema was more important for me during this time than Polish cinema.”

One advantage of working with co-productions is the funding opportunities it opens. “A few years ago I did the mini-series Burning Bush, produced by Czech HBO, written by a young talented scriptwriter and produced by young Czech producers, who are now the producers of Spoor. It’s great to have partners who are close and intellectually interesting and economically ambitious.” Here too, Holland must be practical, considerate, pragmatic; Spoor was funded with money from Poland, Germany, Slovakia, Sweden and Czech Republic. Which brings its own obligations: the score had to be recorded in Slovakia, the sound in Sweden, the special effects in Czech Republic. And each company had its own calendar and schedule: months became years.

“The economical and artistic logic are not always preserved,” Holland explains. “The local funds ask you to spend the money on a certain territory. So you have to sometimes shoot in places you don’t have to shoot, because you have to spend the money there. Or your crew grows bigger, because you have to employ some talents from different markets. And although we had to shoot practically everything in Lower Silesia, except for some days in Berlin, we had to do all post-production outside of Poland. So instead of taking four months it took nine or ten months. So suddenly it was four years of my life. But I’m for this in general. I think good producers know how to make it organic.” Time enough for mainstream politics in Poland to drift right — a process that seems only to have sharpened, as these things often do, Spoor’s sense of timing, its dark humour, and its anti-establishment prickliness.