Holland was born in Ludlow, Shropshire, U.K., to parents who were members of the Bruderhof Christian community, a pacifist communal group with no private property.
At age four his family moved to the German speaking Bruderhof community in a remote area of Paraguay,[1] among the hostile Indigenous people of the Chaco; they returned to the U.K after a decade.
[2] When he was in his teens he learned that his mother was a Jewish refugee from Vienna, his maternal grandparents had been murdered in the Holocaust, and many of the Germans he had known in Paraguay were resettled Nazis.
[3] Upon return to the U.K. he continued his education in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, and then graduated a teacher training college allied to Manchester University with degrees in German and theatre.
The exhibibit showed at the ICA in London, and then he toured with it for a year in the U.S.[4] From 1981 to 1991 he worked for Survival International creating media campaigns [1] championing the rights of threatened tribal people.
"[6] The 1993 Prix Europa and Emmy entry[1] Good Morning Mr Hitler was based on a discovered amateur film of the Nazi Munich festival of July, 1939.
Beginning in 2008, and lasting for more than a decade, he spoke with about 300 Germans and Austrians who had lived through Nazi Germany, "from former SS members and concentration camp guards to farmers and housewives," who, directly or indirectly, participated in the Holocaust, even if only as witnesses.
He collected 500 hours of film of the townspeople and examined issues including agism, effects of globalization on villages, the failing farm industry and fox hunting.