A few years ago, a friend of the Polish director Agnieszka Holland found the body of a man who had died of hypothermia in the exclusionary zone at the border between Poland and Belarus—the Green Border. “The image of that young man,” Holland said in an interview, “freezing to death here in my country . . . is so horrible. In the face of this crisis manufactured by politicians, we must take a clear position as artists, as people as a society, as a country.” For 45 years, Holland has been taking clear moral, social, and political positions in films that speak out against fascism and authoritarianism, against patriarchy and the oppression of women. Among them are at least two masterpieces—Europa Europa (1990), a wildly comic but completely factual Holocaust survival story; and the eco-feminist thriller Spoor (2017), which brings to mind a remark by Isaac Bashevis Singer: “In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.”
Green Border, Holland’s latest, is structured novelistically, with four interlocking chapters and an epilogue. The film opens with a Syrian family and other migrants from the Middle East and Africa attempting to cross the border from Belarus, whose president had made public promises of safe passage into Poland, from which they could travel anywhere in the European Union. None of this turns out to be true, and the migrants are literally pushed and tossed back and forth across barbed-wire fencing by border guards. Some die, but some manage to escape into the deep forest and treacherous swamps on the Polish side. As the film continues, its focus shifts to a Polish border guard, then to a group of aid workers who play by the government’s rules and are therefore ineffectual, and then to a woman who breaks with the activists in order to transport three young men from Congo to a safe house.
Perhaps the most shocking scene in the film is the most familiar. We are suddenly on another border, the one between Poland and Ukraine, where white Eastern Europeans welcome other white Eastern Europeans with open arms. Holland has made a film about European racism today as the resurrection of its Nazi past, but I cannot imagine that audiences in the United States will watch Green Border without reflecting on the migration crisis at our own southern border.
The following interview is compiled and edited from two conversations with Holland, one in October 2023, the other in June 2024.
Green Border was released in Poland just a few weeks before the 2023 parliamentary election. The film had a serious effect. Specifically, the prime minister and the head of the then-ruling Law and Justice party took to social media to call it a collection of lies, shameful, and disgusting; and the minister of justice compared you to Josef Goebbels.
The response was different from what I expected. The attacks by the highest officials in government were unprecedented, even compared to Communist times. This aroused the curiosity of the general audience, especially those opposed to the [far-right] Law and Justice party government, so people went to the theaters in large numbers. And in the Q&As after the screenings, the response was more powerful than for any of my films before. The film played a part in mobilizing people, and influenced them to go out and vote against the ruling party. But unfortunately, the new democratic government has a lot of problems because the previous government—the authoritarian, nationalistic party—is still very influential and they’ve undermined many institutions, and we still have the same president. So now the new government has adopted the populist language of the so-called European mainstream. And 85 percent of the population is supporting this position. So you see how easy it is to spread this racist, nationalist hysteria. And when you have some aggression coming from the migrants, mostly orchestrated by political power plays, it triggers this moral hysteria, which goes beyond the facts. The result is that now the soldiers are allowed to shoot migrants, pretty much at will. The soldiers know they won’t be prosecuted. My worst fears are meeting reality. And I’m pessimistic about where it will go in the future.
Is this the case on all of Poland’s borders, even on the border with Ukraine?
No, you cannot shoot Ukrainians coming into Poland, or Black people who have been living in Ukraine.
The southern border here in the U.S. is also a site of chaos, much of it engineered by people who are trying to destabilize our democratic government by enticing people from Latin America to migrate, telling them that it’s easy to enter the U.S. And with the election coming up, the Republicans, having blocked the moderate bill that the Biden administration drew up, have forced Biden to take really terrible positions.
It is the same in Europe. The Democrats [the center-right Civic Coalition] in Poland are making the mistake that is already happening in Germany and France. The politicians have not learned a lesson, and neither have the people. The politicians think that if they take over the fascist agenda, more people will vote for them. But how can you support a politician who says one thing and six months later does the opposite? We are losing our belief in human rights, the thing that makes us special. And if we lose that, we have nothing to defend. I think we may need another inoculation of totalitarian violence to understand what we have lost and to start over.
It’s amazing that you could make Green Border in Poland. I know you didn’t ask for state funding. But where did you shoot?
The forest on the border where these things are actually happening is a primeval one, and it belongs to the state. We knew we couldn’t shoot a movie like this there. We didn’t want the government to know what we were doing. And in fact, that forest is too far from Warsaw—we didn’t have travel money to go back and forth. But we had seen documentary coverage of what was happening in that forest, and there is a forest near us that looks enough like it. It was a limited space, but good enough to reconstruct what was really happening. The forest is really important. It needed to be realistic, but also like the forest in a horror story—how it would be for the refugees who came thinking they would be in a paradise. We shot the entire film in 24 days. We knew we had to work fast. We had two units shooting simultaneously. I directed the scenes in the forest—the complicated scenes. And my colleagues [Kamila Tarabura and Katarzyna Warzecha] directed the more intimate scenes. It was quite experimental. I like collective work and I like my collaborators to get involved in the creative process. I’ve worked that way for years, especially with my daughter Kasia Adamik. She was working on her own film, so she arrived late and helped me with the scenes in the forest, especially with the children.
I didn’t do storyboards for those scenes. I wanted scenes of total chaos. Nothing that happens is deliberately planned. They are not scenes of war or of liberation. It is the expression of violence and chaos and despair. I’ve been working with this cinematographer [Tomasz Naumiuk] for a long time. He has the intelligence of a storyteller. Without him, the movie could not have happened in this way.
The first section of the movie is almost unbearable to watch. How did you decide how many times to show the refugees being pushed back and forth across the border?
The factual horror of the situation is in the repetition, but, because it is unbearable, we had to decide how many times [we could show it]. We had two big pushes from one side and one from the other. And then we began to get involved in different storylines. It was pretty much like this in the script, but we made some changes in the editing because not every storyline is interesting. My philosophy, when I am not working with a linear storyline, is to create different entrances into the story, to see it from different angles and characters. So the experience of the film is not the same for everyone. Some people are more interested in the refugees, some in the border guard and his story, and some in the activists.
The film is also a lesson in how to act in a crisis like this one. The group of aid workers are not effective, and it’s not until the psychoanalyst decides to risk arrest by transporting the migrants out of the exclusion zone that something positive happens.
When we were doing the research we saw that, when the state is failing, there are two ways you can go: you can look for solutions for the good of others on your own, or you can follow the state law, which isn’t working. In the fascist state during the Holocaust, everything was done as the state decreed. But when the state is an illegitimate, fascist state, you have to act on your own. So I’m old enough to say: fight the state.
But in relation to the border crisis here and in Europe, hardly anyone is doing anything.
No, except these small groups in Italy and France, and in Poland and Lithuania, but they are small, unrelated groups. I’m not so in touch with what is happening in the U.S., where everyone is so caught up by the fear of Trump or some other monster that it appears that they can’t act. But you have to act, because the monsters won’t disappear.
A lot of people here think Putin is great.
And a lot of people in Africa do as well. Because we’ve failed. Western democracy has been lazy.
The first film of yours that I saw, A Lonely Woman (1981), is the only film you’ve made that doesn’t have a glimmer of hope.
I don’t want people to go to the movies and feel hopeless and then sit in their room and drink vodka. Philosophically and existentially, I believe hope is necessary. And in Green Border, in that scene in the safe house, the kids of the rich Polish family who live there are rapping with the refugee kids from Congo. In spite of the problems with the internet, it can bring people together as never before. The kids from Congo, who have escaped because for them there is no future there, know the same music and video games as the Polish kids. Popular culture has become universal. These teenagers have something in common, so there is some kind of value in that—a value in entertainment.
At the end of the film, when you shift to the other border and see the Poles welcoming the Ukrainians, it no longer looks as positive as it did on CNN. It takes just about a half a second to realize that the entire migrant crisis is about racism.
I had thought for a while that the Holocaust inoculated us against racism, but it has come back and it’s visceral. It’s stronger than economic fear. The hate is visceral and it is coming back everywhere.
Very few other directors have the technical chops, the intelligence, and the sense of moral urgency to make a film like this. I think the speed at which you had to work translates into this sense of urgency. Did you learn about speed from working in television?
In television, you must work fast. What you learn is you don’t have to wait for the ideal. But anyway, I’m not a long thinker. I make decisions in the moment. I don’t feel that I lose my integrity when I’m working fast.
I’m curious about one decision you made. The very first image in the film—a drone shot above the forest—is in color and then the rest of the film is black and white. I thought that black and white makes the relationship to history very strong. But it’s also important to show the forest as it exists separate from the situation in the movie or the terrified subjectivity of the characters. I really want to know when you made that decision and why?
Technically, when you shoot digitally, you are always shooting in color. Then you have the choice to keep the color or take the color away. But this film always seemed stronger in black and white, so that wasn’t a difficult decision. But in the editing, when I watched that drone shot over the forest, I realized it was good to show the forest in color, but just once. You can make different interpretations of why it’s that way. That reality is black and white, or… I don’t know… It was just a spontaneous idea and it worked.
One last question. You just finished shooting a film about Kafka. Why do you want to make a film about him?
It is difficult to say why. It is rooted so deeply in an unconscious urge. Kafka was very important to me when I was 14 or 15. And after I read his letters, I saw this strange young man with neurotic double or triple identities and a visionary ability to look into the abyss, which touched me enormously. I felt, when I was young, that somehow he was my brother, and when I went to Prague to study, his presence became very powerful. In 1980, I adapted for television, with my then-husband [Laco Adamik], Kafka’s The Trial. It was shown recently because this is the hundredth anniversary of his death, and people have been writing to me about how relevant and strong that television film is. There are thousands of books written about him. His life is burdened now by those books and biographies. But when I was in Prague, his writings were almost forbidden, and then after the 1968 revolution, he became almost a tourist attraction. It’s all very paradoxical. We finished the shooting just last Sunday, so it’s very fresh. The structure is very fragmented, like a puzzle. There are elements coming from different directions, from his writing and from biographical elements, and even contemporary stuff. So I don’t have an idea of what will come out of it. It will be a big surprise to myself when I watch the first assembly. I’m terrified at this moment.
And who is the editor?
Pavel Hrdlička, the same editor I worked with on Green Border and Spoor and Charlatan (2020). He’s fearless and very sensitive, so I hope he’ll save it.