Agnieszka Holland, a Polish filmmaker, has unveiled her new film Green Border at the Venice Film Festival, following the struggles of refugees on the Polish-Belarussian border. Unfortunately, the film has run into some trouble lately, with Poland’s own justice minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, drawing comparisons between the film and “Nazi propaganda,” much to the dismay of Holland.
“In the Third Reich, the Germans produced propaganda films showing Poles as bandits and murderers. Today they have Agnieszka Holland for that,” Ziobro wrote on X, formerly Twitter. In response, as Hollywood Reporter states, Holland, via AP, is planning to bring defamation charges against Ziobro, if she doesn’t receive an apology within seven days.
On top of the apology, Holland also demands a donation of 50,000 Polish zlotys, which values $11,600 in US currency, to an association helping with Holocaust Survivors.
Polish directors, and the European Film Association, took to defending Holland.
The president of Poland’s Women In Film Association, Renata Czarnkowska, said in a letter seen by Hollywood Reporter that the “Polish government and the media subservient to them [have] decided to slander Agnieszka Holland in the name of vulgar propaganda and defamation of distinguished artists unheard of since the restoration of independence in 1989 [they] ruthlessly smeared her and her film, Green Border, which none of those venom-spitting apparatchiks could have seen.”
As stated, Green Border follows those from North Africa and the Middle East who were lured from to the Belarussian-Polish border, promised easy passage into the European Union. But, they become pawns in a geopolitical game after the Polish government cracks down, leaving those refugees stranded between two countries.
As a director, Holland has actually touched upon the Holocaust in multiple other films helmed by her, including Europa. Europa, exploring stories of Jews hiding in Poland. Holland herself linked the themes of both movies and how Europe itself is “the cradle civilization, culture, democracy and [how] human rights, can become the cradle of totalitarian regimes.”
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