“ Anti-Polish trash can “, “collaborator”, “Jew with Bolshevik roots”… These are some of the insults addressed on X (formerly Twitter) to Polish director Agnieszka Holland. His latest feature film, Green Border (“ green border”), will only be released in Poland on September 22, but he is already the subject of an unprecedented smear campaign since the beginning of the month. A wave which seems to have accelerated since the work received, on September 10, the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, where it was previewed.
Fiction inspired by real events, Green Border (“Green Border”) tells the story of disrupted lives in Podlaskie, a rural region of Poland which adjoins the Belarusian border, at the heart of a migration crisis not seen in two years. In the winter of 2021, tens of thousands of men, women and children from the Middle East and Africa took this new migratory route knowingly opened by Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian leader, dangling the prospect of a rapid transition to the European Union. Pushed back on both sides by the Belarusian and Polish authorities – who erected a steel wall at the border in July 2022 – around fifty people have already lost their lives.
“It’s orchestrated by power”
Approved in Venice and in the festivals where it has already been presented, the film received a much more eventful reception in the native country of Agnieszka Holland, who lives most of the time between Poland, France (of which she acquired the nationality ), and the United States. Campaigning for the legislative elections of October 15, the ultraconservatives of the Law and Justice Party, in power since 2015, considering aid to migrants and criticism of pushbacks as playing into the hands of Lukashenko – launched the first attacks. “During the Third Reich, the Germans produced propaganda films showing Poles as bandits and murderers. Today they have Agnieszka Holland for that,” said the Minister of Justice, Zbigniew Ziobro, September 4, on.
The anger of the conservative right against the director is not new. The latter is one of the intellectual figures most committed to the defense of minority rights and the fight against the authoritarian leanings of PiS.
“I expected hostile reactions, but I didn’t think I would be dealing with such a tsunami,” confides Agnieska Holland, reached by telephone in Toronto (Canada), where her feature film is selected for the International Film Festival. “It is orchestrated by those in power who hope to benefit from beneficial spin-offs for the elections. I am accused of being an agent of the Nazis or of Putin, it depends. All this is all the more ironic since almost my entire Jewish family, on my father’s side, perished in the Shoah.
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