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WARSAW — Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party has launched a vitriolic campaign against acclaimed director Agnieszka Holland for making a harrowing film that centers on how Poland handles — and maltreats — migrants trying to cross its border with Belarus.
In a febrile pre-election atmosphere, Holland has faced such an onslaught of invective from PiS leader (and Poland’s de-facto ruler) Jarosław Kaczyński, the president, the prime minister, justice minister and other top officials that she’s paying a security company to protect her.
In one of the more caustic attacks, President Andrzej Duda described her film as “anti-Polish.” He then went on to quote a protesting border guard union that used a World War II resistance slogan leveled against Poles who went to see Nazi propaganda films: “Only pigs sit in theaters.”
“I’m not afraid but I’m not stupid, either,” Holland told POLITICO, referring to her need for protection. “They’re fueling hate and there can always be someone unstable who could go after me. And they know it well — if you set fire to a house with a thatched roof, it’s going to burn.”
Such fears of violence are not far fetched — particularly when stoked by the perennial government line that opposition figures are anti-Polish and pro-German. An opposition lawmaker was assaulted last week, reawakening memories of the murder of the liberal mayor of the Baltic city of Gdańsk in 2019.
Still, confronting Holland makes political sense for the nationalist, conservative Law and Justice party. It is in a knife-edge fight ahead of the October 15 general election, in which it will try to win an unprecedented third term in office, partly by promising to keep Poles safe from external threats, including migrants.
Holland’s film “The Green Border” undermines the government’s patriotic view that Poland is always in the right.
The fictional black-and-white movie tracks people from Syria and Afghanistan trying to enter Poland through the dense forests along its border with Belarus, the human rights activists trying to help and the Polish officers faced with the moral dilemma of how to deal with the migrants. It’s based on the still-ongoing effort by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko to destabilize Poland by allowing people to fly to Minsk with the promise they’ll be able to enter the EU.
But that promise is a lie. In a lethal cat-and-mouse game, people are taken to the border by Belarusian forces, but then pushed back by Polish border guards who refuse to accept their asylum claims — a violation of international rules. They’re then stuck in often freezing forests and swamps. Human rights groups say 43 people have died since Lukashenko created the crisis in 2021.
Holland’s film won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month, and has received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics.
But not from the Polish government — most of whose members attacked it without having seen it. Kaczyński called the film “shameful, repulsive, disgusting” and said Holland, 74, was teaching people to hate their own country. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Facebook called it “a collection of shameless lies.”
Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro compared Holland to Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. “Soviets and Nazis used propaganda films to destroy image of Poland and Poles,” he said, and attacked Holland for having a father who was a communist.
Holland has threatened to sue him, but Ziobro says he won’t apologize.
One right-wing politician published the names of actors in the movie and compared them to three wartime Polish actors who collaborated with the Nazis — one of whom was shot by the resistance.
Błażej Poboży, the deputy interior minister, last week demanded that theaters showing Holland’s movie first run a short government-produced warning spot.
Movie theater operators have largely refused.
Holland, one of whose best-known films was “Europa Europa” in 1990 about a Jewish boy avoiding the Holocaust by joining the Hitler Youth, is astonished by the government outrage.
“I have expected some reaction from the government, but not this,” Holland said, when reached by phone at her Warsaw home. “It’s unheard of in a democratic country that you would have the entire ruling camp attack an artist using these kind of references.”
The film’s release wasn’t tied to the upcoming vote, she said.
“I didn’t even plan on timing the release of the film right ahead of the election. I planned it in line with the calendar of international film festivals,” the director said.
The denunciations of “The Green Border” aren’t putting off audiences. It drew 137,000 viewers on the opening weekend, the best numbers for a Polish production this year.
But the ruling party’s attacks aren’t about keeping people out of theaters, they’re about firming up the support of voters and peeling away the backers of the far-right Confederation party — PiS’s best chance for a victory on October 15.
The government has long said that migrant pressure on Poland’s border with Belarus is an element of a “hybrid war” waged against Poland by Russia’s close ally. Poland has stationed thousands of police and troops along the frontier and built a steel fence to keep people out.
In a referendum that will be held alongside the election, PiS will ask voters: “Do you support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa”
But a burgeoning bribes-for-visas scandal and news that Poland has issued hundreds of thousands of work permits to people from Africa, the Middle East and Asia has PiS on the back foot — opening the party up to attack from Civic Coalition, led by former Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who warns the government is opening Poland’s doors to Muslim migrants.
That helps explain the vitriol of the attacks on Holland.
Holland said she has also faced criticism from the anti-PiS camp for giving the government an issue to stir up voters.
“There’s some thinking that ‘we’ will lose the election because of my film, not because PiS holds all the cards, and not because the opposition is lazy,” she said.
It’s unclear whether the kerfuffle over the film is going to have much of a real impact on the election. A new poll by the IBRIS organization finds almost half of Poles feel the fuss won’t affect the outcome, with 16.2 percent thinking it will help the opposition and 10.7 percent that it will boost PiS.
But Holland is less interested in making a political point and more interested in showing the moral crisis created by migration.
“We are at a turning point here in Poland and in Europe, facing a challenge that no one is taking seriously,” Holland said, adding that the number of people trying to enter Europe will only grow thanks to the climate catastrophe.
