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Polish film director Agnieszka Holland said her new film, The Green Border, which shows non-European migrants’ experiences on the Polish-Belarusian border, is helping to treat Poles with historical trauma.

“When I had a meeting with an audience in Poland, not only were the people crying and giving standing ovations, but the conversations afterwards were a bit like collective psychotherapy,” she said. “I didn’t expect that the reaction of the audience could be so high, that people could be shaken and moved by the film and at the same time elevated.”

Ahead of Sunday's pivotal parliamentary elections, the film has become part of a divisive and ugly election campaign.

While she has been backed by the Federation of European Screen Directors after harsh government reactions and got the Special Jury Prize for the film at the Venice Film Festival, Holland was forced to take on 24-hour security protection when in Poland for the film's Sept. 22 release,

“There could always be some dangerous person who takes the propaganda to heart. In fact, the only person who did come at me was a local politician in Bialystok,” she said.

A nuanced picture

Holland’s two-and-a-half-hour black and white film is divided into several sections, each looking at the crisis from a different angle.

We see a Syrian family led by parents Amina and Bashir and an Afghani teacher, Leila, who joins them at the border. The second section follows one of the guards, Jan, whose pregnant wife sees a viral video in which he beats refugees. In the third, we see Julia, a Polish woman who rescues Leila from a swamp behind her house.

Minsk to blame?

After Belarus opened its borders in late 2021 to migrants and refugees wanting to cross into the EU, thousands of men, women and children made the dangerous crossing into Poland.

Human Rights Watch accuses Belarusian authorities of manufacturing the crisis. There have been reports of migrants being given planks to cross rivers and taxis carrying ladders to straddle the 5-meter (15-foot) fence.

But, as Amnesty said, there are people who have been subjected to violence on the Polish side as well. Locals who try to help are also often followed by soldiers and their homes searched and some activists from the volunteer group, Grupa Granica, have been detained for allegedly helping migrants cross the border into Poland.

Official figures said more than 50 people have died in swamps and bogs since September 2021, though migrant groups said the real number is much higher.

Government attacks

The film touched a raw nerve with Poland’s ruling right-wing, anti-immigrant coalition government.

The Polish government led by the Law and Justice (PiS) party has since 2015 opposed all migrant entry into the EU. When the first wave of refugees came over the Belarus border in August 2021, the government talked of refugees from outside Europe as “dirty” and “disease-ridden,” and spoke of “terrorists,” “sexual perverts” and “criminals” crossing the border.

President Andrzej Duda in a televised interview repeated the WWII slogan” “Only pigs sit in the cinema,” used to refer to Poles who frequented cinemas during Nazi wartime occupation.

Poland’s government has said it will broadcast a “special clip” in cinemas before screenings of the film to inform viewers of its “many untruths and distortions.”

“Those who make such films and who support them, those who receive them well, are essentially Putin's army,” said PiS president Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

"This is a lampoon, a disgusting, disgusting lampoon," he said.

According to Kaczynski, Holland fits into the history of “her community … an environment that comes from the Polish communist party, from people who served Stalin, who was exactly the same genocide as Hitler," he said. Holland is the grandchild of Holocaust victims.

"The same tone we experienced in 1968, when Poland's remaining Jews were forced to leave the country, is there in what he says," said Holland.

The nationalist Polish association of communism and secular Jews, both before, during and since the end of communism in 1989, is a familiar and often used rhetorical device that places Holland within a milieu -- a “community” -- that is effectively, by virtue of its ethnicity, claimed to be anti-Polish.

“Polish services have been successfully defending the border against illegal immigrants sent by Lukashenko and Putin, storming it for two years. Now they also have to deal with the slanderous theses of the creators of the film,” added Kaczynski.

PiS said the film is a preparation for tearing down the fence on the Belarusian border and pushing Warsaw to agree to the EU’s relocation of refugees.

The party has long attacked those whom it sees as a form of internal dissidence from the patriotic line. It has sued US-Polish historian Jan Gross and others for claims that Poles were complicit or actively engaged in the murder of Jews in WWII.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki was equally furious. “They show our people as idiots and bastards, Poles as primitives. They are trying to destroy our good name as those who opened their hearts and doors to over two million Ukrainians,” he said.

Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro said he would not withdraw remarks likening Holland to a Nazi propagandist. When Holland threatened to sue him, the minister said it was more important how he is judged by God than by a court. He added that he too had not watched the film.

Working against the opposition?

However, some believe the film may represent a political gift for PiS in a country where nearly 70% of voters evaluate the Border Guard positively.

One of the main slogans of the PiS campaign, “Security,” is associated not only with Russia's aggression in Ukraine, but with strong anti-immigrant rhetoric and the situation on the Polish-Belarusian border combines both threads.

Despite the damage done to the so-called visa scandal, which undermined the main axis of the campaign, PiS has not missed any opportunity to refer to the negative effects of the EU’s open borders policy.

But Holland is not convinced by this line of reasoning. “I think the film was needed. That the people didn’t want to be lost in the narrative that everything is fine and that we can speak only in the narrative of elections,” she said.

“I have the feeling, not solid data, that the opinions of people are shifting from supporting the government to being very skeptical about what they say,” she added.