In October last year, Piotr Szczęsny, a 54-year-old chemist and father of two, doused himself in petrol in front of the communist-era Palace of Culture and Science in central Warsaw then set himself on fire. The act was a protest against creeping authoritarianism under Poland’s populist right-wing government. Szczęsny died in hospital 10 days later.

“I love freedom first and that is why I decided to immolate myself, and I hope that my death will shake the consciences of many people,” he had written in a cogently argued manifesto that doubled as a public suicide note. In Poland, sympathisers hail him as a successor to Ryszard Siwiec – another Polish family man in his 50s, who set himself on fire in Warsaw’s national stadium in 1968 as a protest against the crushing of the Prague spring – and Jan Palach, the Czech student who self-immolated the following year. Yet Szczęsny’s act went almost completely unreported in the western press, with editors nervous about being seen to ascribe a political motive to his actions, an anxiety exacerbated by his history of depression.

As he lay dying in hospital, audiences at the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester sat down to watch Parliament Square, an acclaimed play by James Fritz in which a female protagonist, overwhelmed by an unspecified dark turn in Britain’s politics, sets herself on fire in front of the Houses of Parliament. The play’s run in Manchester began the day before Szczęsny’s act of protest, and ended the day before his death. What does it say that we should have paid more attention to a fictional character’s radical act of protest than we did to an identical action by a real human being that resulted in his death? And does the coincidence of the two events suggest that dystopian fantasies are becoming increasingly difficult to separate from real life?

Such questions weigh heavily on Agnieszka Holland, the celebrated Polish film-maker who turned 70 last week. In 2013, Holland made Burning Bush, an HBO mini-series that begins with Palach’s self-immolation and explores the dilemmas of conformism and resistance that confronted those he left behind. Her new Netflix series, 1983, which is set in a dystopian recent Polish past in which communism never fell and authoritarianism never went away, has a similarly eerie theme.

“The world of fiction is entering our reality – so many things are starting to come true that I’m starting to be afraid of the projects I am taking on,” she says, sitting in her modest top-floor apartment in the southern Warsaw suburb of Mokotów. “It shows that people focused on creative expression have some kind of premonitory feelings about the dangers ahead of them.”

1983 comes billed as “the first Polish Netflix original series” and is a conspiracy thriller set in the year 2003. In this alternative Polish reality, a wave of bombings in the year of the title has consolidated the grip of the communist regime even as the iron curtain fell around it – so the country enters the 21st century in authoritarian isolation.

While Polish audiences will draw obvious parallels with the country’s ruling Law and Justice party (PiS), under which the force of law and the will of “the party” are again starting to converge, Holland is keen to stress that the series also raises themes that are highly relevant across the west.

‘The world is not ready to choose radical solutions’ … Agnieszka Holland. Photograph: Leszek Szymański/EPA

“The Poland in the series is isolated – much more isolated than in the communist era. Outside influences are very rare, so the country develops its own version of modernity. Prosperity is limited, but people don’t know how it is outside so they feel safe and happy. They are manipulated by this propaganda, but they feel it is good for them.

“Of course, this is very close to what PiS would love to have in Poland. But the real questions are: maybe these people are happy? Maybe freedom is overrated? These questions are important for all of us. Maybe people who are feeling lost want someone to come along and tell them what to do. Maybe we are facing so many challenges and problems and threats of modernity that we cannot bear it. This is an issue in the UK and US and other countries, not just in ‘post-communist’ countries like Poland.”

While many liberals in western Europe and north America still struggle to make sense of what Holland describes as the “conservative counter-revolution”, for their Polish counterparts, especially those of Holland’s generation, the threat of authoritarianism is only too familiar. And in Poland there is a particular puzzle: why do so few young Poles seem to be joining their older compatriots on the streets in pro-democracy protests?

“Throughout Polish history, the young people wanted to fight, and they had to be held back by the older people,” says Holland. “But in our situation now, the problem is that young people do not want to fight, they are not interested in the kind of fights that were traditional Polish fights – romantic opposition to an oppressive reality. Instead, they seem indifferent, and this is what irritates the older generation so much, they have the impression that they are not how Polish youth used to be.”

Conservative counter-revolution … a Law and Justice party rally in Warsaw in 2016. Photograph: Czarek Sokołowski/AP

Unlike many others of her generation, however, Holland does not consider younger Poles as constituting some kind of ungrateful generation, unappreciative of the rights previous generations fought for. Instead, she sees them as victims of a wider technological revolution that has made them, in the words of the French essayist Raphaël Glucksmann, les enfants du vide, or “children of emptiness”.

“The fact that the new generation has no experience of ‘slavery’ has an impact, but I think a bigger change is the internet revolution and the existential problems it has created in terms of emptiness and loneliness. The older generation doesn’t understand those problems, they see it as some kind of spoiled caprice.”

As a three-time Academy award nominee who divides her time between Poland, France and the United States, Holland is often rubbished by supporters of Law and Justice as an out-of-touch member of the global cultural elite with little sense of the challenges faced by contemporary Polish youth. But as someone who emigrated to France in 1981 and experienced the prejudices of westerners towards what they regarded as “lesser Europe”, she identifies with the feelings of inferiority engendered in many young central and eastern Europeans who moved to western Europe for work after the EU’s eastward expansion in 2004.

I thought to myself [Poles] will go west, they will enjoy being consumers, but they will always be considered second-class citizens

“I thought to myself at the time [of the expansion], they will go west, they will enjoy the ability to buy things, to be consumers, but then they will realise that they will always considered second-class citizens, and the emptiness and feelings of inferiority would push them towards the nationalistic sentiment,” says Holland.

“I knew it because I had my own experience of emigration in France. I was in the elite, I was successful, but I still knew exactly how I felt like a poor cousin in this family, and that the even poorer cousins, the children of Polish workers and peasants, would feel even worse. And it happened.”

Holland is less pessimistic about Poland’s future than she was a year ago – although Law and Justice emerged as the largest party in local elections held in October, it fared less well than expected, breaking its “psychological hold” over the country. But she is less sanguine about a whole host of other global issues.

“This is not just about Poland. It is also about Trump, Syria and Yemen; it is also about neo-fascist movements in Germany and in Sweden; it is about the threat of an ecological catastrophe. All these problems are so huge that they need some kind of radical solution, but the world is not ready to choose radical solutions.”

A woman lights a candle outside Warsaw’s Palace of Science and Culture to commemorate Piotr Szczęsny. Photograph: Tomasz Gzell/EPA

Talk of the need for radical action brings the conversation back round to Szczęsny, Siwiec and Palach. Holland is keen to draw a distinction between endorsing such drastic acts and praising the courage of those who choose to make the ultimate sacrifice in an attempt to awaken their compatriots to the threats that may or may not be closing in on them. “Fire destroys,” she said at the time of Szczęsny’s death, “but it also illuminates. Like anger.”

But she has a sobering message for those who assume that people will choose freedom when the moment of truth actually comes.

“Palach’s message was that if you want freedom, you have to be ready to die for it. And he offered to the people the sacrifice of a terrible death. And the people said, actually, if freedom means we have to die for it, let’s choose slavery. They see this burning man, and they see that for freedom people have to die, and they say no, a life that is not free is better than not living at all.”