Agnieszka Holland Calls for Apology After Politician Compares Migration Drama ‘Inexperienced Border’ to “Nazi Propaganda”

Director Agnieszka Holland has demanded Polish Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro apologize for feedback he made on-line evaluating Holland’s new movie, The Inexperienced Border, to “Nazi propaganda.”

Ziobro, a number one member of Poland’s right-wing conservative authorities, has sharply criticized the movie, which explores the humanitarian catastrophe affecting migrants alongside the Poland-Belarus border.

“Within the Third Reich, the Germans produced propaganda movies displaying Poles as bandits and murderers. At present they’ve Agnieszka Holland for that,” Ziobro wrote Monday on X, the social platform previously often called Twitter.

Holland mentioned Wednesday, by way of AP, that she deliberate to convey defamation expenses towards Ziobro until she receives an apology inside seven days. She additionally demanded that he make a charitable donation of fifty,000 Polish zlotys ($11,600) to an affiliation that helps Holocaust survivors.

Polish administrators and the European Movie Affiliation have defended Holland following the political assault.

In an open letter, seen by The Hollywood Reporter, Renata Czarnkowska, president of Poland’s Girls in Movie Affiliation, mentioned the “Polish authorities and the media subservient to them [have] determined to slander Agnieszka Holland within the identify of vulgar propaganda and defamation of distinguished artists exceptional for the reason that restoration of independence in 1989 [they] ruthlessly smeared her and her movie, Inexperienced Border, which none of these venom-spitting apparatchiks may have seen.”

Inexperienced Border premiered in competitors in Venice on Tuesday, getting rave critiques. THR known as it a “devastating dramatic triumph.“

The movie dramatizes the plight of migrants from North Africa and the Center East who have been lured to the Belarusian-Polish border by propaganda promising simple passage into the European Union. As an alternative, they grew to become pawns in a geopolitical recreation when the Polish authorities cracked down, leaving them stranded and ravenous within the swampy, treacherous forests between the 2 nations. Inexperienced Border is certainly one of a number of movies in Venice that take a look at the plight of migrants attempting to achieve Europe.

Evaluating Holland and her film to Nazi propaganda is deeply ironic. The director is greatest recognized for her 1990 Holocaust movie Europa, Europa and the Oscar-nominated In Darkness (2011), which appears on the plights of Jews hiding in Poland throughout WW2. Talking to THR, Holland linked the themes of Inexperienced Border to Europa Europa, saying each movies explored how Europe, which on one hand is “the cradle civilization, tradition, democracy and human rights, can turn into the cradle of totalitarian regimes.”

“Agnieszka Holland’s movies are fairly often about braveness, and about fearlessness within the face of injustice,” famous Inexperienced Border producer Mike Downey, who can be chairman of the European Movie Academy. He praised the solidarity of Holland’s Polish colleagues within the face of the political condemnation. “Agnieszka is coming below enormous private and public assault in Poland, and it’s such acts of solidarity which mirror the extraordinary job she does in talking out towards injustice and oppression..We’re all in settlement. Staying silent shouldn’t be an possibility.”

Inexperienced Border is screening on the Toronto Movie Competition and might be launched in Poland on Sept. 22.

Sept. 7, 8 a.m. This story has been up to date so as to add Holland’s assertion.

This story was initially revealed on Sept. 6 at 2:45 a.m.