Agnieszka Holland speaks during the 61st New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center in New York City on Oct. 4.Arturo Holmes/Getty Images
Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland has been making films for nearly 50 years and she hasn’t shied away from tackling difficult subjects or expressing controversial views. But she has never felt the kind of hateful backlash that has accompanied her latest film, Green Border.
“I had a lot of problems with the authorities during the communist time and I’ve been imprisoned even in my youth,” Holland said in an interview from France where she spends much of her time. “But this kind of hate campaign, I didn’t experience to that extent.”
Holland, 74, is all too familiar with hateful propaganda. She grew up in Warsaw the daughter of a Jewish father who lost his family in the Holocaust, and a Catholic mother who fought in the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis in 1944.
She’s been making films, documentaries and television dramas since studying film in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and her best known movies – Angry Harvest (1985), Europa, Europa (1990), and 2012′s In Darkness – focus on the Holocaust and earned three Academy Award nominations.
In many ways Green Border was a return to the themes of racism and hate in those earlier films.
The title is taken from a Polish expression for an unguarded border and the movie depicts the brutal tactics used by Polish and Belarusian border guards to push migrants back and forth across the boundary. Humanitarian groups say at least 50 people have died since the crisis began in late 2021 and around 200 have gone missing in the thick forest that separates the two countries.
Poland has blamed Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko for luring migrants from the Middle East and Africa to Minsk and then sending them across to Poland. In response, the Polish government has built a 5.5-metre-high steel wall along 186 kilometres of the frontier and barred the media and aid workers from coming within two miles.
The movie portrays the issue from three perspectives: a group of migrants trying to get across, humanitarian workers offering help and a Polish border guard conflicted by his orders.
It has been celebrated at film festivals around the world, including in Toronto and Venice where it won the Special Jury Prize. But when it opened in Poland in September, Green Border was met with vitriol by senior figures in the populist Law and Justice government.
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki accused Holland of slandering border guards and President Andrzej Duda said “only pigs sit in the cinema,” a reference to a phrase used during the Second World War to describe people who watched Nazi propaganda movies.
“In the Third Reich, the Germans produced propaganda films showing Poles as bandits and murderers. Today they have Agnieszka Holland for that,” Poland’s Minister of Justice Zbigniew Ziobro wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Holland received so many threats that she had to be accompanied by bodyguards to public screenings. But she refused to be intimidated. She criticized the government during a number of high-profile appearances across Poland and sued Ziobro for libel.
She made the film partly out of anger at what was going on at the border, but also because she saw parallels with the same hatred that had led to so many other atrocities including the Holocaust.
“I studied very carefully the history of 20th century and the history of the crimes against humanity,” she said. “And I see similar kinds of this danger, threats, in Europe today.”
She also calculated that if the government was so afraid of the media that it banned access to the border, then it was up to her to tell the story. “So I will make a movie about it.”
She shot the film in a matter of weeks earlier this year, using a private forest near Warsaw in order to avoid the need for official permits. The movie opens in colour but quickly switches to black and white, which Holland said was done in part to signal a transformation into a horror film.
Postproduction work was rushed so that the film would be ready for Venice and other festivals. “A movie like that absolutely needed the seal of important international festivals,” she said. “If not, it will be destroyed by the authorities.”
Opposition leader Donald Tusk celebrates with supporters in Warsaw on Oct. 15's election night, when an exit poll showed his coalition would form a majority.Anna Liminowicz/The Globe and Mail
The film was released in Poland during a bruising election campaign where cracking down on immigration and national security were key issues.
On Oct. 15, voters turned aside Law and Justice, or PiS, and handed a coalition of opposition parties, KO, a comfortable majority in the legislature.
The groundbreaking result ended PiS’s eight years in power and KO leader Donald Tusk has vowed to reverse the damage PiS has done to the country’s democratic institutions. But PiS won the most votes in the election and Duda’s term as president has two years remaining.
“It’s kind of a miracle,” Ms. Holland said of KO’s victory. “But the new coalition doesn’t have any margin for mistakes.” She still worries about the increasing polarization she has witnessed in her homeland and elsewhere, and the impact that’s having on filmmakers who take on difficult topics.
Studio executives have become more wary of controversial issues “because they know that automatically they are losing a big part of potential audience,” she said. “But the world is more and more controversial. Filmmakers have to fight to express themselves fully, and to describe the world in all its complexity.”
Marta Winianek-Miatus, right. with her partner, leave a cinema in downtown Warsaw after watching the Green Border. 'It’s a very important film,' she said. 'It’s about every human being.'Anna Liminowicz/The Globe and Mail
She has taken heart by the reaction from Polish filmgoers who have packed cinemas to see Green Border. “I didn’t expect that the film will have such a an incredibly emotional and moral response,” she said.
That was evident on a recent Saturday at the Kinoteka cinema in Warsaw’s Palace of Culture.
“All Polish people should see this movie,” said Joanna Dabrowska as she left the theatre in tears. “People don’t know the truth about what’s happening on the border.” She added that the film had inspired her to volunteer to help refugees.
Marta Winianek-Miatus said Green Border was about much more than Poland’s reaction to the refugee crisis. “It’s about every human being,” she said. “We can be good and we can be wrong. It’s a choice of everyone but also we should remember that we have to respect human rights. That’s the most important.”