The run-up to Poland's October 15 elections generated a series of anti-immigrant stories in pro-government media, with suggestions that the non-white new arrivals are part of a “special operation” organized by Russia. Migrants from Africa and the Middle East, who were openly encouraged by the Belarusian leadership to enter the European Union through the forest bordering Poland and Belarus, were turned away by Polish border guards and left to roam the exclusion zone for weeks, evading hunting dogs and birds. Batons. The number of deaths is not documented.
Agnieszka Holland new movie Green border (“The Green Border”) expresses anger at Poland's heavy-handed and often brutal treatment of overland migrants. PiS ministers condemned the film when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September. Comparisons have been made with Nazi anti-Polish propaganda. Write in Every two weeks (No. 369), Iona Kurz condemns the government attack
A fundamental violation of freedom of expression, artistic expression, and fundamental rights to public debate. The attacks demonstrate the pathological growth in the Polish imagination of the narcissistic myth of “purity” and the focus on the image of the unspoiled Polish military uniform. It's an unusual combination. By invoking the association with Nazi occupation, the authorities completely reverse the situation. They maintain a position that seeks to turn Poland into a historical reconstruction camp, a massive simulation, or a projection of some kind of mythical purity that removes any filth from a country ruled by carrots and sticks.
But despite the film's bold objectivity, its forceful defense of the right to leave one country to live in another, and its implicit criticism of the Polish liberal middle class (“for whom helping people wandering in the woods is 'too much'”), Holland's focus on… Migrant families suffering and dying in Białowieża Forest reduces the under-covered problem of poverty and social deprivation in the border region.
“The fact that the film relies so heavily on global middle-class society seems to me problematic,” Curtis wrote. “The migrants appear to be ‘people like us’ – educated, multilingual, and relatively wealthy. They have bought the plane tickets, paid the middlemen, and have money for the trip. But the locals in Podlasie are completely absent. Their opinions appear in short clips, and the experience of living and dying fades away.” Long run in forest area in background.
Stagnation and nostalgia
In a dialogue about the pitfalls of filmmaking in times of tension and international war (No. 370), says Ukrainian film director Irina Tselik: “In the post-truth era, even the simplest image can seem like a reflection of a reality that was created to favor a particular side or group.”
Her interlocutor, Ukrainian director Marina Stepanska, commented that in circumstances where people and places disappear overnight, the limitations of cinema are most apparent. “As a medium, film is slow,” Stepanska says. “It's not really appropriate to convey and reframe the here and now, especially when the events are so extreme.” News reporting from the field is one thing, but creative cinematography requires distance to project the vision by juxtaposing bits of different realities.
The war with Russia created a time gap, a state of oblivion, in which all notions of the past and future failed. “The sense of the future is so rooted in the past that everything seems to turn into repetitive nostalgia,” Stepanska notes. It seems to me that the only vision of the future that we are capable of at the moment is: an endless recycling of longing for what was. We cannot imagine the future. Conceptually, it doesn't exist. There is only here and now.
Moving on top
Writer Marta Madiska and cultural historian Magda Szczesniak discuss experiences of social mobility and the search for a better life within Poland since World War II. The country as it is today was largely built by people from poor farming communities who migrated from the countryside to the cities, initially under state socialism, and later in the 1990s. Focusing on women who moved from villages, whose lives have remained largely ignored by sociological research, Madejska and Szczeszniak identify the emotional impact of rural-urban migration, and the disintegration of traditional agricultural networks and communities.
Newcomers to the cities faced abuse and class bias at work, on the streets, and within their new families. They had to find ways of behavior deemed acceptable, learn an unfamiliar and more silent language to express their feelings, often suppressing what they knew. But they also experienced a real sense of freedom from fixed patriarchal structures.
“Apart from job opportunities and the opportunity to gain professional qualifications, the stories women tell point to liberation in their private lives, renegotiation of romantic relationships, and demands for a fairer division of labor at home,” says Szczesniak. But efforts to join the ranks of the intelligentsia led to severe pain and psychological stress. The sources show how, throughout the existence of the Polish People's Republic, the intelligentsia struggled for dominance.
Although, under communism, Polish intellectuals maintained a monopoly on publishing, morality, taste, and the correct use of language, ideas promoting social equality and justice were very widely supported. “The memoirs of upwardly mobile people show a strong conviction that leveling class differences is important and must be done. They truly believed this. Today, the egalitarian language of socialism is derided as a hypocritical smokescreen. But my research has shown that the idea of social equality has been internalized by many, It was taken seriously, and to some extent it was pursued on an unprecedented scale.
