Filmmaker Agnieszka Holland: ‘It’s possible to commit the worst crimes and never pay’

Agnieszka Holland’s special jury prize at the Venice film festival last month was in many ways business as usual for a Polish director who has been garlanded with awards over the course of her 50-year career. Less welcome or expected was what happened next: she found herself thrust into the heart of her country’s bitter election campaign.

Holland’s new film, Green Border, was seized on by Poland’s ruling rightwing Law and Justice (PiS) party. It tackles the humanitarian crisis brought about in 2021 after the Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, angered by sanctions imposed after his regime’s suppression of pro-democracy protests, encouraged migrants to travel from the Middle East and Africa on chartered flights to Belarus, offering his country as a gateway to Poland and the rest of the EU. Two years later, Holland’s scenes of Polish and Belarusian guards brutally mistreating the new arrivals have been taken as both insult and fuel for PiS’s nationalist narrative in the run-up to the vote on Sunday.