It's 10:00 p.m. in Berlin and Polish director Agnieszka Holland, who has just returned from a long day on set to participate in a Zoom interview, is too exhausted to care because, without realizing it, she is sitting in front of a clipping of Mary Poppins, of all people, in her Hollywood-themed hotel room.
Holland is visibly tired, and it's not surprising, given the tight production schedule for her feature film, “Franz,” which she calls “a kind of experimental biography of Franz Kafka: fragments to touch on the mystery.” But the more he talks about her extraordinary latest film, “Green Border,” opening Friday in Los Angeles, the more her passion for the project takes over and her fatigue fades almost magically.
A stunning refugee story, “Green Border” is both an extension of frequent themes for the writer-director (whose credits range from 1990’s “Europa Europa,” the best-known of her Oscar-nominated trio, to three episodes from the landmark HBO series “The Wire”) and something that feels completely new. It also proved controversial even for Holland, sparking a level of hostility in her homeland that the 75-year-old filmmaker said was unparalleled in her decades of uncompromising work experience.
“It created a lot of hatred in Poland from the Polish government,” he recalls. “In my long life I have had very difficult experiences, but the hate campaign by officials was unprecedented. It was unpleasant for me, I received many threats,” to the point that he considered it necessary to hire full-time bodyguards.
A scene from “Green Border” by Agnieszka Holland.
(Kubis Agate)
The criticism started from the top, from Jaroslaw Karczynski, head of Poland's then-ruling Law and Justice Party, who in 2023 called the film “shameful, repulsive and disgusting.” Senior Polish ministers called “Green Border” “intellectually dishonest and morally shameful,” compared it to Nazi propaganda films and the Netherlands to top Third Reich official Joseph Goebbels, and in one case concluded that the director had lost the right to call oneself Polish.
The government went further: it denied “Green Border” an Oscar nomination for best international film and demanded that theaters precede the film's screening with a two-minute short film stating the official point of view. “The government made some propaganda clips showing how wonderful the Polish state was,” Holland says. “Some cinema owners refused to show it, which was very brave, and a government-backed cinema that had been blackmailed into showing it said: 'We will show it, but with a title that said that all the money from the exhibition will be given to activists. groups'”.
Ironically, Holland says of the threats: “Although it was unpleasant to me, they were so violent, so aggressive, that in the end they were exaggerated and helped the movie at the box office,” making “Green Border” one of the best films of the year. . the highest grossing in Poland. “And then I never had such long and important discussions with the audience, people who stayed hours after the screening. Our courage to speak openly gave courage to many people. “It was very moving to see this.”
The film behind the rampage, winner of a special jury prize at Venice, is closely based on a real-life situation that is, appropriately, strikingly Kafkaesque. As of 2021, Aleksandr Lukashenko, the longtime ruler of Poland's neighbor Belarus and a close ally of Russia's Vladimir Putin, made it surprisingly easy for Middle Eastern refugees to fly to his country. Once they arrived, they were taken directly to the border and literally pushed into Poland.
Except it wasn't the Poland they expected. It was the Green Border, a densely forested area described by the New York Times as “a two-mile-wide exclusion zone around the border” that featured “a 116-mile-long, 18-foot-high barbed-wire fence.” ” which was heavily patrolled by numerous Polish border guards. They rounded up the refugees and pushed them back to Belarus, from where they were expelled back to Poland. This back and forth was repeated, sometimes ad infinitum, with beatings, robberies and deaths.
“The past that was never healed, frankly, is still present,” says Holland, photographed at the Film Forum in New York in June.
(Evelyn Freja / For The Times)
Holland, who knows the dynamics of the situation deeply, says it all started with the Syrian civil war of 2015. “Europe is deathly afraid of the arrival of people whose skin color, religion and culture are different,” he says. he says she. “And that was immediately used by right-wing populist governments to create an atmosphere of fear and danger.”
Lukashenko (with the probable support of Putin) chose to make things worse, opening that corridor to refugees “to destabilize Poland and Europe, to show that the Europe of democracy and human rights is nonsense,” the director continues.
Furthermore, Holland relates, “the Polish government banned access to humanitarian organizations and all media. This meant that it was not only impossible to help these people lost in the forest, but also to document the cruelty of the border guards.
“Karczynski, the main political force in Poland, said something that was relevant to me. 'The Americans lost the war in Vietnam when they allowed the media to go there and send pictures of children burned with napalm. We will not allow images to come out.' So I felt like it was my responsibility to try to tell that story while it was still happening.”
Not only that, Holland was determined to “tell the story from the human perspective. For me, the feeling of reality is important.” Holland and his two co-writers, Gabriela Lazarkiewicz-Sieczko and Maciej Pisuk, “spent hours and hours talking to different people. “We finally managed to talk secretly with the border guards so they could share their experience, their point of view.”
Due to the controversial nature of the film, the most time-consuming aspect was fundraising, which took an entire year and even included money from an American producer, Fred Bernstein. “Green Border” ended up being a Polish-French-Czech-Belgian co-production, and Holland, who was also a producer for the first time, said the experience gave her a new appreciation for the complexity of European film production.
A scene from the movie “Green Border.”
(Kubis Agate)
The resulting film tells the story from the point of view of three different groups. First introduced is a family of refugees from Syria, who hope to eventually join a relative in Sweden. Then there's a Polish border guard who wants to do the right thing but isn't sure what he is. Finally there is a therapist who little by little is acquiring an activist role in her border town. Adding to the drama is a coda showing how Poland's reaction changed when faced with another influx of refugees, this time from a racially similar Catholic Ukraine.
Because Holland was so concerned with verisimilitude, she put special care into casting. “The actors were professional actors but also real Syrian refugees,” she explains. “They didn't have to imagine how Syrians felt, they knew what it meant.” And for the local activist, Holland chose Polish actress Maja Ostaszewska, who in her off-screen life “was helping at the border with human rights activities.”
Shot in just 24 days in luminous black and white by cinematographer Tomasz Naumiuk, “Green Border” brims with urgency and immediacy. “It was a very special kind of work, very collective,” Holland recalls. “Some days we worked with two parallel units, with two young Polish women as directors. We did it secretly from the Polish government, but we found unity.”
In addition to his Europa Europa, Holland has made several films dealing with Holocaust scenes, and admits that at one point he believed that “the experience of the Holocaust, the horror that humanity faced in seeing itself capable of such things, created a kind of vaccine against nationalism. But since September 11, the vaccine no longer works, that immunity has evaporated. Little by little, old habits and old demons are coming back.”
Adding to that feeling for Holland is the coincidence that the Green Border area is quite close to the former location of Sobibor, a World War II German death camp that was the site of a famous rebellion and prisoner escape. “When they escaped, the people in that camp looked exactly the same as these refugees,” he notes, “and they escaped exactly into that forest.”
The possibility of the world slipping back into a horrible past is very much present in both “Green Border” and its director. “It’s like when a tooth is sick and it gets worse and worse,” he explains. “If you don’t treat it early enough, you’ll lose it. The past that was never healed, frankly, is still present.”
