Agnieszka Holland - controversy about film about migrants

[Jaga]

Agnieszka Holland is a Polish director of Jewish descent. She is very talented but famous also for directing films that are almost "on the edge". They show people in crisis situations which might happen but they are aggravated to the point that it is hard to watch. She is a winner of many international awards. Recently she made a film that is very uncomfortable for the current government "Green boarder".

www.politico.eu/article/film-green-border-agnieszka-green-poland-government-hate-campaign-election-pis-kaczynski-duda/

Polish government whips up hate against director over migrant film
With an election looming on October 15, there’s a lot of politics behind the ruling party’s attacks on Agnieszka Holland.
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.”

[pieter]

Jaga,

I saw Agnieszka Holland's Europa Europa (1990), The Secret Garden (1993) and In Darkness (2011).

Some of Holland's most famous work has been her depictions of the Holocaust. These works have been controversial because of Holland's commitment to realism, and the acceptance of all types of individuals both as victims and as flawed human beings deserving of guilt. According to an article written about Holland, her films about the Holocaust "cling to the world as she sees it. A world in which wisdom, if it exists at all, lies in accepting the violence and human frailty in everyone, without exception, including Jewish people". This is most poignant in Holland's 2011 film In Darkness, in which Jewish and Polish Catholic characters are juxtaposed as having some of the same reprehensible qualities as well as redeemable ones.

Holland's best-known film may be Europa Europa (1991), which was based on the life of Solomon Perel (a Jewish teenager who fled Germany for Poland after Kristallnacht in 1938). At the outbreak of World War II and the German invasion of Poland, Perel fled to the Soviet-occupied section of the country. Captured during the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, Solomon convinced a German officer that he was German and found himself enrolled in the Hitler Youth. The film received a lukewarm reception in Germany, and the German Oscar selection committee did not submit it for the 1991 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. However, it attracted the attention of Michael Barker (who handled Orion Classics' sales at the time). Europa, Europa was released in the United States, winning the 1991 Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay.

Almost twenty years later, Holland released In Darkness (2011), a German-Canadian-Polish co production that dramatized the story of a Polish sewage worker who aided a group of Jewish refugees by hiding them in the sewers of Lwów during the time when Jewish people in the city were being sent to extermination camps. The story focuses on the relationships between ethnic Poles and Jewish people during the Holocaust. The characters of In Darkness are shown as having some strong similarities, despite the fact that the realities for Jews and ethnic Poles, specifically those depicted in the film, are extremely different. By comparing the Polish protagonist to the Jewish ones, Holland recreates the morally confusing and physically brutal world that though very different for those who were hunted, was everywhere during the Third Reich. This juxtaposition seemed to be a reflection of Holland's own personal experience, specifically her struggle with identity and anti-semitism.

Pieter

[pieter]

Sept 27, 2023 19:38:54 GMT -7 Jaga said:

Agnieszka Holland is a Polish director of Jewish descent. She is very talented but famous also for directing films that are almost "on the edge". They show people in crisis situations which might happen but they are aggravated to the point that it is hard to watch. She is a winner of many international awards. Recently she made a film that is very uncomfortable for the current government "Green boarder".

www.politico.eu/article/film-green-border-agnieszka-green-poland-government-hate-campaign-election-pis-kaczynski-duda/

Polish government whips up hate against director over migrant film
With an election looming on October 15, there’s a lot of politics behind the ruling party’s attacks on Agnieszka Holland.
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.”

A country that has lost the ability to accept and tolerate critical films is in serious trouble. This is an attack on art and cinema.