Three-time Oscar-nominated Polish director Agnieszka Holland is going ahead with her defamation suit against Poland’s justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro after Ziobro refused to apologize for public comments in which he compared Holland’s new film, the refugee drama Green Border, to “Nazi propaganda.”
A court in Warsaw has upheld Holland’s right to pursue the case, in which she is demanding an apology for the comments and calling on Ziobro to make a charitable donation of 50,000 Polish zlotys ($11,600) to an association that helps Holocaust survivors.
Ziobro, a leading member of Poland’s right-wing conservative government, made the comments on X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, on Monday, Sept. 4, ahead of Green Border‘s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
Green Border is a dramatization of the real-life plight of refugees caught on the natural border between Belarus and Poland. The refugees were lured there by propaganda from Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who cynically engineered a geopolitical crisis, promising migrants easy passage over the Polish border into the European Union. But the Polish government refused to let them in, leaving families stranded and starving in the swampy, treacherous forests between the two countries. Holland’s film intertwines the perspectives of the stranded refugees, Polish border guards and activists defying the Polish government, which has sealed off the border area, to help the migrants in the forest.
Without having seen the film — only a trailer had been released when he posted his comments —Ziobro condemned Holland’s depiction of events, comparing her portrayal of Polish border guards to Nazi propaganda.
“In the Third Reich, the Germans produced propaganda films showing Poles as bandits and murderers. Today they have Agnieszka Holland for that,” Ziobro wrote.
While the defamation case proceeds, Ziobro is under the equivalent of a gag order and not allowed to publicly comment or publish anything related to Holland and her films until the dispute is settled.
Mike Downey, a producer on Green Border, tell The Hollywood Reporter that Holland is pursuing other possible legal cases against other members of Ziobro’s party, Suwerenna Polska (Sovereign Poland), which have publically disparaged the director and the film.
“More legal battles are coming,” he says.
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