They accuse Holland of bending reality. Did the cruelest scenes from “The Green Border” really happen?

The campaign against her film “” continues. The director decided to make a production about the humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border. The very fact that she chose this area of ​​commentary did not please the Polish right wing and its supporters. Even before the official premiere, scandalous voices appeared that the work of the director awarded at the Venice festival was anti-Polish, and there were even comparisons to Nazi propaganda.

Are the most cruel scenes from “Green Border” real? The writer talked to activists

Mikołaj Grynberg is the author of the book “Jesus died in Poland”, which contains a record of conversations with people who decided to help refugees from the eastern border. “The people whose voices are heard in this book took responsibility for this sphere that was abandoned by the state,” we read in the description of the book published by Agora Publishing House. The author of the reportage was at the border, where he listened to the accounts of a large group of activists. They told him about the realities of the crisis that Agnieszka Holland tried to portray. Grynberg seems to be the right person to answer “The Green Border” viewers as to what was true in the film and whether the director of “The Green Border” actually “colorized” reality.

Wirtualna Polska Grynberg’s journalist about the consistency of the director’s film with real events. The writer admitted that Holland spared her viewers a lot. The most frequently criticized scene from “The Green Border” on the Internet is the one in which a pregnant woman was thrown by a guard over barbed wire. Grynberg emphasizes that such situations actually took place. “Many people who saw what was happening at the border told about such situations. Yes, the guards were throwing adults and children. Before the fence was built, they were throwing them through wire fences,” says the author.

“Deliberate, perverse cruelty”

But that’s not the worst. “When they threw ‘wrong’, people got entangled in this wire. And it is cruel, designed specifically to hurt. It cuts clothes, cuts the skin. It is sharp, and also has hooks that stick into the body and it is difficult to free yourself without harming yourself,” the writer adds in an interview.

Another fragment of Holland’s film that was widely criticized was the moment when the border guard breaks a thermos. In this way, he wants to hurt the person who wants to drink it with pieces of glass. Unfortunately, this story is also true. “This is a story confirmed by activists. They were told about it, independently of each other, by at least two people on the road. In their opinion, it was intentional, perverse cruelty,” Grynberg notes.