Agnieszka Holland has always led a political life. She has witnessed the impact of multiple occupations and dictatorial regimes. She was present for the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague. She is considered one of the most important Polish directors to have lived; alongside Krzysztof Kieslowski, AndrzejWajda, Krzysztof Zanussi, (all mentors, collaborators and friends of hers) Małgorzata Szumowska, Paweł Pawlikowski, and Jerzy Skolimowski. Her career output is varied from literary adaptations, biographical works, and original screenplays. Holland has been nominated for and won major awards.
Art as an act of resistance and empathy has been a vital part of her filmography before her breakthrough work 1990’s Europa Europa. Agnieszka Holland in making Green Border has now become a pariah in her home country by an increasingly right-wing political contingent and is considered a base propogandist by multiple governmental figures.
Green Border is one of Holland’s greatest cinematic achievements in years. It is both an act of compassion and a call to recognise harm. The grand stateswoman of Polish cinema has returned with a gripping piece of political and humanistic art.
Nadine Whitney had the opportunity to speak with Agnieszka Holland before the screenings of Green Border at the Perth Festival from 17 - 23 March 2025.
I was absolutely harrowed by Green Border. But you didn’t end the film on a note of hopelessness. However, the journey to that ending is entrenched in my memory. It’s a brave and powerful film that makes people truly look at the refugees who are fleeing for their lives.
Can you tell me how you set up the documentary style of the film? How you made it on the ground as such following the family of refugees and then the perspectives of the Polish aid workers, the Polish Border guards, and the Belarusians?
Agnieszka Holland: We made the film in real time. From the beginning of the border crisis. However, I had been considering refugee crises for over ten years or more. When I realised that I would like to make the movie, I contacted two screenwriters (Maciej Pisuk and Gabriela Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko)and the producer who were ready to take the risks, because we've been working on researching it in a very hostile environment. The government had been half authoritarian and very adverse to any kind of attempts to touch upon the subject.
They forbade access to the zone when the atrocities have been happening and a feature film was the only tool to tell that story properly. We wanted it to be as true as possible and as documented as possible. We’d been uniting tonnes of statements, interviews, and recordings. We’d been talking to many people from all sides. We wanted to tell the story: which is not only one story, so we made some kind of the synthetic creation of many stories which somehow have been very similar, yet every one of them was also absolutely unique. We wanted to preserve that uniqueness and to give the real voice, the living voice, to the people who've been deprived of their voices. We also wanted to give them a face because they became faceless.
The refugees became just a tool of Lukashenko and the tool of Polish propaganda. We had been looking for the style which will be the most appropriate. Choosing to film in black and white was our first decision, stylistically speaking. What we realised is that the people who are witnessing the border crisis immediately had a connection to images from the Second World War and a lot of terrible things that happened in that very area during the Holocaust. A death camp in Sobibor was in that neighbourhood, and the prisoners who escaped that camp after a revolt were hiding in the very same forests. So, the images from then, and the images from now melted together for the witnesses, and also for me. I made several films about the Holocaust, as you know.
I was rewatching In Darkness just before I started to speak with you, and I noted within that film that it was possible for characters to learn and change through their first-hand interactions with the people in the Lvov ghettos.
As is also evident in Green Border, In Darkness reiterated that it is possible for people not to be of a single propaganda groupthink and to break away from the notion of the monolithic “Polish/Ukrainian Aryans” – as in the persona of Leopold Socha. There is a difference between individuals and their empathy and regimes that have none.
AH: The Polish people are far from being terrible, you know, but many are weak human beings very susceptible to some kind of propaganda. We are all susceptible to propaganda. Our values, the values we believed in in Poland, human rights and democracy, solidarity and equality might not ensure comfort. Many are choosing comfort and have to accommodate our brain in believing those choices are justified.
Three years later, after the events and described in Green Border the situation didn't change, it didn't end. It's still going on. And the new government, which is the liberal centrist government is doing the same thing as the previous government they once criticised. The new government using a very similar kind of propaganda.
These kinds of global situations have become more dangerous and more relevant now with the election results in the United States. One of the key people in the new administration, Elon Musk, said a sentence which is chilling, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
If somebody who is practically ruling the world is saying that it is deadly dangerous to all of us. Hannah Arendt said, “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” We are we are there now. And of course, one movie like Green Border can do little against that. It can just touch some consciousnesses and hearts of people who've seen it. It's what I what I feel we have to do: we have to talk with in a way which is sincere, courageous, and true.
You've paid quite a personal price for making Green Border with the Polish government essentially calling you a propagandist. How does that sit with you being one of the most important proponents of Polish film throughout your lifetime?
AH: Part of the country. I don't like generalisation, because in Poland during those years I was also met with signs of warm sympathy and solidarity. This is a war between two tendencies or sides. Those who think that empathy is the worst thing that happened to Western civilization, and those who think that empathy is our biggest human treasure which will stop us from falling into the abyss of fascism.
Poland is polarised and divided as practically all societies and countries right now, and that is Putin's victory.
I think people feel deeply disempowered because they don't know where to start practically activating their empathy because there are so many crises around the world. It’s easy to forget that the border crisis in Eastern Europe is ongoing, because there's another, bigger, more urgent one somewhere else. People’s attention becomes split, and atrocities can keep occurring because we simply aren't paying attention to everything.
AH: But you know, we cannot sleep on that. We cannot be indifferent. The most important thing is to keep up with the sensibility to be humanistic and fight for our destinies and own our own humanity.
I hope many people do go see the film at the Perth festival, because it is an extraordinary piece of work. Where you finished Green Border with Poland welcoming Ukrainian refugees, that in itself is a different situation now. Things have changed even since the film came out. It is even more urgent that we pay attention.
AH: Yes, yes. I think that it is very urgent, right? I hope we are not beyond the point when we can still make a difference.
Green Border is a powerful return to the fierceness and the humanity I expect from Agnieszka Holland Did you feel that as well, that you were coming back with a punch?
AH: We are proud of the film. I'm proud of it because of its fever and its urgency, and the fact that the film I wanted to do happened. It needed a lot of will and a lot of work and a lot of collaboration from great, courageous people. I think that Green Border for me personally, changed a lot.
I didn't stop after it! I'm just finishing a strange unconventional biography of Franz Kafka.
Back to filmmaking in Prague.
AH: Yes, yes. We are sending the film to festivals right now. It is very different, but I think somehow it is similar manifestation of the freedom, also the creative freedom I seek to preserve lately.
I look forward to whatever you've done with Franz Kafka's story. I'm sure it's absolutely extraordinary, and I can't wait to see it.
AH: Thank you. It was really a pleasure to speak with you.
It is one of the most treasured moments in my life to have the opportunity to speak with you, Agnieszka. I thank you profoundly for all you have given to cinema and art.