The run-up to Poland\u2019s bitterly fought election on 15 October generated a spate of anti-immigrant stories in pro-government media, with suggestions that non-white newcomers are part of a \u2018special operation\u2019 orchestrated by Russia. Migrants from Africa and the Middle East, openly encouraged by the Belarusian leadership to enter the EU through the forest that borders Poland and Belarus, have been pushed back by Polish border guards and left to wander the exclusion zone for weeks, dodging hunts with dogs and batons. The number of deaths is undocumented.<\/p>\n
Agnieszka Holland\u2019s new film Zielnona Granica<\/em> (\u2018Green Border\u2019) expresses outrage at Poland\u2019s heavy handed and often brutal treatment of overland migrants. The film was denounced by PiS ministers as it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September. Comparisons were made with anti-Polish Nazi propaganda. Writing in Dwutygodnik (no. 369), <\/em>Iwona Kurz<\/a> condemns the government onslaught as<\/p>\n a fundamental infringement of free speech, artistic expression and the elementary rights of public debate. The attacks show the pathological growth in the Polish imagination of the narcissistic myth of \u2018purity\u2019 and a fixation on the image of an unsoiled Polish military uniform. It\u2019s an extraordinary mix. In invoking associations with the Nazi occupation, the authorities are completely inverting the situation. They sustain an attitude that seeks to turn Poland into a historical reconstruction camp, a huge simulation, a projection of some kind of mythological purity that washes away any dirt from a country ruled by carrot and stick.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Yet despite the bold topicality of the film, its robust defence of the right to leave one\u2019s country to live in another, and its implied criticism of the Polish liberal middle class (\u2018for whom helping people wandering in the woods is \u201ctoo much\u201d\u2019), Holland\u2019s emphasis on migrant families suffering and dying in the Bia\u0142owie\u017ca forest diminishes the underreported social issue of poverty and deprivation in the border region. \u2018The fact that the film leans so heavily on the global middle-class community seems to me problematic,\u2019 writes Kurz. \u2018Migrants are shown to be \u201cpeople like us\u201d \u2013 educated, multilingual, relatively well-off. They have bought plane tickets, paid middlemen and have cash for the journey. But the local population of Podlasie is all but absent. Their views feature as brief clips and the experience of long-term living and dying in the forest region fades into the background.\u2019<\/p>\n In a dialogue about the pitfalls of filmmaking in times of international tension and war (no. 370<\/em>), Ukrainian film director Iryna Tsilyk<\/a> remarks: \u2018In an era of post-truth even the simplest image can appear to be the reflection of a reality constructed to the advantage of a particular side or grouping.\u2019<\/p>\n Her interlocutor, the Ukrainian filmmaker Maryna Stepanska, comments that in conditions where people and places disappear overnight, the limitations of cinema are more pronounced. \u2018As a medium, film is slow,\u2019 Stepanska says. \u2018It\u2019s not really suitable for conveying and reworking the here and now, especially when events are so extreme. News reporting from the field is a different matter, but creative cinematography demands distance to project a vision by juxtaposing fragments of different realities.\u2019<\/p>\n War with Russia has created a temporal gap, a limbo, in which all notions of past and future fail. \u2018The sense of a future is so rooted in the past that everything seems transformed into recurring nostalgia,\u2019 Stepanska observes. \u2018It seems to me that the only vision of the future of which we are capable at the moment is just that: an endless recycling of longing for what has been. We cannot imagine a future. Conceptually, it doesn\u2019t exist. There is only the here and now.\u2019<\/p>\n\n
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<\/p>\nStasis and nostalgia<\/h2>\n
Moving on up<\/h2>\n