Refugee Drama ‘Green Border’ Maintains September Release In Poland & Eyes Oscar Run Amid Political Backlash & Hate Speech Campaign

deadline.com:

Veteran Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s Venice Special Jury Prize-winning refugee drama Green Border will release as planned in Poland on September 22 in defiance of a political backlash and wave of online hate talk.

Inspired by real-life events along Poland’s border with Belarus, the film has touched a raw nerve with the ruling right-wing, anti-migrant coalition led by the Law and Justice (PiS) party for its depictions of Polish border guards pushing back and abusing newly arrived refugees.

Public criticism of the film by coalition politicians has been accompanied by a wave of extreme online hate talk against Holland, some of it anti-Semitic, calling on her to be tried for treason or expelled from Poland.

Sales agent Jean-Christophe Simon at Films Boutique announced on Wednesday (September 13) that the company been forced to disable the comments on social media pages promoting the film, after they were targeted by right-wing groups. “After trying for several days to ‘moderate’ our social networks in a rational and legal manner, we had to close the comments for the first time, following hundreds of hate messages (often anti-Semitic and coordinated) from the Polish extreme right (and probably Russian trolls), fuelled by the shameful remarks of the Polish Minister of Justice,” he said Last week, Polish Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro (leader of the PiS-aligned Sovereign Poland party) posted on X that Green Border was in a similar vein to a Nazi Germany propaganda film “showing Poles as bandits and murderers”, and then later referred to Holland as Stalinist in a separate address.