TOgnieszka Holland has a lot of life and a lot of work behind him. Fifty years of careerfilm studios in Prague, he worked with the greatsAndrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi, collaborated with Krzysztof Kieslowski, he has made small festival films and great historical films, not all successful, but always highly awarded (three Oscar nominations), he directed episodes of successful American TV series, House of Cards, The Affair And The Wire.
To the last one Venice Exhibition she took home the Grand Jury Prize for Green Border, which comes out in cinemas on February 8tha film for which she was the subject of a very violent defamation campaign by leading figures of the Polish populist party in government, Law and Justice, then defeated (despite having obtained a relative majority) in the elections last October.
President Andrzej Duda he called for a boycott, saying that “only pigs sit in cinemas”, a slogan used by the Polish resistance during the German occupation when only Nazi propaganda films were shown in theatres.
The Green Border by Agnieszka Holland
Green Border tells of the crisis that at the end of 2021 involved thousands of refugees from the Middle East and Africa, to which the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko had presented Minsk as a gateway to Poland and the rest of the EU. The Polish government, predictably, refused entry to the migrants whose choices at that point were reduced between being beaten and dribbled between barbed wire by border guards, drown or freeze to death in the forest of “exclusion zone”, «which is almost an Amazon forest, a hostile place with swamps and rivers where men, women and children were trapped for months” Holland tells A I Woman.
Green Border weaves together the perspectives of refugees stranded in that no man’s land, Polish border guards and activists of “Grupa Granica” who challenged the governmentto bring food, clothing and medicine into the forest.
The boundary that determines choices
His film is not a documentary. How much truth is there in what you show?
It’s not a documentary, but it’s a very documented film: everything I had available, reports, documents, testimonies, entered the narrative. And one of my co-writers spent some time in the forest with refugees and activists. Everything you see in Green Border happened. Certain, the film is fiction, we created a narrative structure and characters. We see what happens through the eyes of a family of Syrian refugees, of the Afghan teacher who joins them on the journey, of the border soldier who never imagined having to do what he does, of NGO activists and of a psychologist that she would never have become an activist if she hadn’t witnessed what was happening just a few meters from her home. It is the border that determines their choices.
A scene from Green Border.
The Polish government’s strategy of closing the area to the media worked and for a long time almost nothing was known about what was happening in no man’s land. What drove you to tell the story, a crisis of conscience?
Part of my family was killed in the Holocaust and I made three films about that, another about Stalin’s crimes (Mr. Jones – Stalin’s shadowabout the famine in Ukraine, ed), I have made films about crimes against humanity and I did it because I think that what I tell is never finished, it is not part of our past, but of our present, perhaps in a latent way, but it is written in our genes Europeans. Maybe it’s been dormant for a while, after the Holocaust we considered ourselves vaccinated, and we created institutions such as the European Union to prevent the reappearance of nationalism and racism, but the vaccination has evaporated and perhaps the time has come for a booster. This is my experience, which comes from my family history and from my work as a narrator, I know that what I have told can still happen along other borders. I saw soldiers guarding the Belarusian-Polish border, normal human beings, transform into cruel executors of inhuman orders. It’s very easy to change. So I thought I had to talk about it, especially when authorities have sealed off the area to keep that horror away from the eyes of opposition politicians, journalists and medical and humanitarian organizations. Jarosław Kaczyński (until 2023 Vice-President of the Council of Ministers of Poland, ed) said it clearly: «When the Americans allowed journalists to go to the front they lost the Vietnam war», thus admitting that terrible things were happening in that forest.
The film ends, perhaps, with a nod of hope: the reception of Poles towards Ukrainian refugees in 2022 was very different.
I’m not sure that scene gives us hope. It tells us that we are capable of doing good, it shows that we chose to help the Ukrainians, but at the same time what was happening on the Belarusian border has not changed, we just looked away. And we convinced ourselves that we were doing our duty. (In fact, protests by truck drivers and farmers over “unfair competition” radically changed Polish attitudes toward Ukrainian refugees the following year, ed).
The search of an activist in Green Border.
It also tells us that there are series A and B migrants.
Racism is a “natural” reaction in human beings. And it is so on all continents. In Africa there is racism. In Tunisia, for example, where European governments pay a dictator to push back sub-Saharan migrants, preventing them from reaching Europe. The same happens on the border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia where Ethiopian refugees are violently rejected and often killed. The spread of racism in America where border agents in Texas push children back into the river is evident. But he never left Europe.
A tribute to the tenacity of activists
At Israeli checkpoints, the Israeli women of the Machsom Watch association, often mothers of the soldiers themselves, monitor the behavior of those who monitor them. Should Europeans of good will do the same and monitor the EU’s borders?
I believe it, yes. I have a lot of admiration and respect for the activists and NGOs who do that work, often in countries where their activities are considered illegal. My film is a tribute to their perseverance. Many of the activists who started in Poland two years ago are now in therapy. The task they have given themselves is very tough.
It was hard for her too: she was under terrible pressure.
The authorities were very violent towards the film. The Minister of Justice declared: «The Nazis had Goebbels (Propaganda Minister of the Third Reich, ed), now they have Holland.” I have received threats and violent comments on social media, and I know that verbal violence can easily become physical. But these reactions tell us more than anything else that politicians were afraid of the film because it told a truth. A truth that had to remain hidden at all costs.
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