The director Agnieszka Holland says her movie “Green Border” encourages empathy with migrants trying to enter Poland. But the government has likened it to Nazi propaganda.
Before it even arrived in movie theaters, “Green Border,” a film about the grim fate of migrants stuck at the Polish-Belarusian border, stirred up a storm in Poland, as the country gears up for a national election. Pool Security Fence
Directed by Agnieszka Holland, the movie won the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month, and was praised by international critics when it played shortly afterward at the Toronto Film Festival.
But it didn’t please government officials in Poland, who called the film “anti-Polish.” A state-owned broadcaster used a prime-time news segment to slam its director. Some border guards likened the movie’s viewers to Poles who watched Nazi propaganda films during World War II.
The feature, which was released in Poland on Friday, has touched a raw nerve in a country, with a painful history of its own, that was already on edge because of the war in neighboring Ukraine. The governing Law and Justice party is expected to face a tough battle in the election on Oct. 15, and to whip up support it has boosted the image of a nation threatened by migrants and the war raging next door.
“Green Border” depicts a migration crisis that erupted in late 2021 at Europe’s gateway: the forested border between Poland, which is a member of the European Union, and Belarus, a dictatorship, which is not. At the time, Polish and European authorities accused the president of Belarus, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, of selling tourist visas to migrants from the Middle East and Africa, who were seeking a way into the European Union, then busing them to Poland in order to destabilize the bloc.
In response, Poland’s government created a two-mile wide exclusion zone around the border and later installed a 116-mile-long, 18-foot-high barbed wire fence. It also deployed thousands of soldiers and border guards to push migrants back from Polish territory into Belarus But Belarusian authorities also ordered its border police to force migrants back into Polish territory. Many bounced back and forth for weeks, and sometimes months.
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