Poland’s right-wing government has upped its attacks on The Green Border, the new film from acclaimed, Oscar-nominated Polish director Agnieszka Holland, requiring theaters in Poland to run a government-approved warning video ahead of the movie.
The move, unprecedented in democratic Poland, comes ahead of The Green Border‘s national release on Friday, where it will go out wide on 250 screens across the country via distributor Kino Swiat.
The Green Border premiered to critical acclaim at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month where it won a special jury prize. Critics lauded the movie, with The Hollywood Reporter review calling it a “devastating dramatic triumph” and naming The Green Border one of the top 15 movies of the fall festival season.
The film is a dramatization of the plight of refugees stranded on the natural border between Poland and Belarus. The migrants, most of them from North Africa and the Middle East, were lured to the border by propaganda from the Belarusian regime, which had promised them easy passage into the European Union. Instead, they became pawns in a geopolitical game when the Polish government shut down the border, leaving them stranded and starving in the swampy, treacherous forests between the two countries. The black-and-white drama intertwines the perspectives of the stranded refugees, Polish border guards, and activists providing help to the migrants in the forest.
Even before its Venice premiere, The Green Border sparked a furious backlash from the Polish government, with Polish justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro comparing the film to “Nazi propaganda” for its supposedly negative depiction of Polish police and border guards. In a TV appearance, Polish President Andrzej Duda also made the Nazi comparison, calling for a boycott of the film, saying “only pigs sit in the cinema,” a World War II slogan used by the Polish resistance during German occupation when only Nazi propaganda films were shown in Polish theaters.
“It’s quite funny, really, the minister of injustice has accused me of being a Nazi and then, in a recent press conference, compared my film to Stalinist propaganda, so I’m both Hitler and Stalin, apparently,” said Holland, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter. The director calls the allegations absurd, pointing to some of her most famous films, including the Oscar-nominated Europa, Europa (1990) and In Darkness (2011), both stories of Jewish suffering during the Holocaust, and 2019’s Mr. Jones, about the Stalin-caused famine in Ukraine in the 1930s, referred to locally as the Holodomor. She is pursuing legal charges against Ziobro for defamation.
But the Polish government, which is up for re-election on Oct. 15, is doubling down on its Green Border attacks. On Thursday, interior minister Poboży appeared with a spokeswoman for the national border guards, calling Holland’s film “a disgusting lampoon” and its depiction of the events on the green border “extremely unfair, unauthorized, and harmful to border guard officers, soldiers [and] all those who defend the Polish border at the risk of their health and life.”
The interior minister has produced a warning spot that will run ahead of all screenings of The Green Border in Poland. Poboży said the video will counter what he called the “untruths and distortions” of Holland’s film.
Holland called the Polish government’s response “typically Orwellian, they are twisting the meaning of words. They are attacking while saying they are being attacked. They are the perpetrators claiming to be the victims. It’s sadly not at all surprising.”
Alongside what she calls “a wave of hate” against her film, Holland says there has been “a wave of solidarity” from many in Poland and from the international film community, who have come out in support of her and against the government’s attacks. Groups including the European Film Academy, the Europe Screen Directors and Poland’s Women in Film Association have written public letters of support for the 74-year-old filmmaker.
All eyes will now be on a press conference in Warsaw on Monday when Poland will officially unveil the film it is putting forward as its best international feature contender for the 2024 Oscars. In a typical year, The Green Border — an internationally acclaimed film from a legendary, twice-Oscar-nominated Polish director — would be considered a frontrunner. Poland’s Oscar committee is officially independent of the government. The Green Border was produced as an international co-production with no public subsidy support from Poland. The film has sold widely but does not yet have a distribution deal for North America or other English-speaking territories.
