Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland working on the film Green Border.Agata Kubis/Courtesy of Kino Lorber
Talking with Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland over Zoom the other week, it becomes deeply, darkly funny that the soft-spoken 75-year-old has become Warsaw’s public enemy number one.
A deeply humane and philosophical artist who is known as much for her historical films (the Holocaust drama In Darkness, the Holodomor biopic Mr. Jones) as her family films (The Secret Garden), Holland ignited the incendiary ire of her country’s government this past fall when she released Green Border, a harrowing thriller dramatizing the reality facing Syrian migrants caught between the Belarus-Poland border.
As the film made the festival rounds in Venice and Toronto, Poland’s then justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro compared it to Nazi propaganda for its critical depiction of Polish border guards, while the country’s interior ministry slapped a preshow warning ahead of all screenings to counter its “untruths and distortions.”
While Polish audiences largely ignored the panicked pleas of their government – the film topped the country’s box office for several weeks in a row this past fall – the attacks have been renewed as Green Border begins to open in international markets, including Canada, where the film will be released in select theatres starting June 28.
Just a few days after wrapping shooting on her Green Border follow-up, an experimental drama about the life of Franz Kafka, Holland spoke with The Globe and Mail about her controversial and essential work.
This past fall, you sued Poland’s minister of justice and attorney-general for defamation. What’s the status of that situation?
We made the legal action, but the tribunal courts in Poland are working very slowly. There was a previous legal action taken against me by a group of extreme-right Catholics and the process altogether took five years. So, I’m not expecting things will happen quickly, especially because the minister is not the minister any more, as his government lost the elections. And he is very sick, with cancer. I hope that he survives, because while I don’t like the guy at all, I don’t wish him death. But I’d like him to pay me some money, so I can transfer it immediately to the activists working on the border.
Are you still in touch with the activist community that you dramatize in the film?
We have very close relationships, and after the movie was released, they’ve been helping with talking to journalists to explain the details. Mostly, they’ve embraced it as a vision of the truth, though they’ve said that the reality is much worse. That my movie was too soft. The hope that they had was that the new government would be supportive of the issue, but it was a painful illusion as it’s now the same nationalistic, military agenda. And my film is suddenly being criticized again. I’ve received threats on social media – people calling me unpatriotic and a “useful idiot of Putin.” Nothing has been resolved.
If the situation is as bad as it’s ever been, how do you handle that dispiriting reality as a filmmaker?
When I was a young person, I was very influenced by the myth of Sisyphus – pushing that heavy stone against the hill, and when you’re on top, the stone falls back, and you come down again. But you don’t resign yourself, you start pushing again. This is my life. It’s a choice. I decided long ago that I wouldn’t have the illusion that a film could change much, just that it would open some eyes. When I was showing the film in France a few months ago, the same question came up: Can you change the world with your film? I said no, but one young girl stood up and said, “You haven’t changed the world, but you changed my world.” I’m not interested in the crowds but the individual.
Was the film made more for Polish individuals, then, or the rest of the world?
Of course, the reaction of my fellow Poles is emotionally the most important. It’s a mirror to my own population. But I knew when making the film that I wanted to tell a particular story that is happening in Poland, of migration, that in general is one of the biggest challenges of modernity. We have to all deal with that, because it poses a very difficult choice in front of us, as white people from rich countries.
It’s interesting to hear that the activists felt your film was too soft. I felt it was a terrifying experience.
I tried to balance it, with some hope and some beauty. But the activists’ experience of going into the [forest that separates Poland and Belarus] every day and facing the misery and cruelty of other people, their perspective is very different from mine. I still have distance, and for them, they face a decision of saving one person and leaving another to die every day.
You made the film incredibly quickly, from shooting to premiering at Venice over the course of just a few months. How do you feel that speed translated into the momentum of the film?
I hoped that it would happen, that it would feel urgent, but I wasn’t sure. But certainly, the speed and the fever that we had, being in movement all the time, not stopping, I think it aligned itself with the film and its style. It helped to have that sincere efficiency. But I also now feel it in my bones, I have to tell you!
Green Border opens in select Canadian theatres June 28.
This interview has been condensed and edited.