2024-06-25
28 分钟We meet two figures in the cultural world known both for their creative practice, as well as their brave attitude towards speaking truth to power. Robert Bound speaks to Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland about her new film ‘Green Border’ and Alexei Korolyov meets Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova to discuss her new exhibition in Linz, Austria. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hello and welcome to Monocle on Culture.
I'm Robert Bounds.
On today's show we're meeting two figures in the cultural world known both for their creative practice as well as their brave attitude towards speaking truth to power.
We'll hear from one of Poland's preeminent film directors, as well as a Russian musician and conceptual artist who happens to lead a world famous feminist collective punk band.
I'll leave you guessing as to which one do.
Stay tuned.
That's all ahead on Monocle on Culture.
First up, we speak with the Polish film director Agnieszka Holland, a practitioner with a long track record of making films that look history's starkest times in the eye.
Europa Europa looked at the plight of Europe's Jews in the Second World War.
A woman alone at life under communism.
Her latest Green Border looks at migration through Europe via the story of Syrian refugees tricked into landing in Belarus by Alexander Lukashenko's slippery rhetoric.
They immediately become political footballs for the Belarusian and Polish border authorities to kick under and over barbed wire border fences by guards reared on hard bitten indoctrination and neighbourly rivalry.
Holland's film is a spellbinding, sad and outrageous story that looks at the border through the eyes of the Syri, a charitably inclined activist and one of the Polish border guards involved.
Shot in black and white and focused on the sometimes swampy, occasionally beautiful forest setting of that border, Holland teases out a protagonist's stories with patience, tenderness and style, but also with a stern eye on the effects that polarizing politics has on people.
Here is my conversation with Agnieszka Holland.
Agnieszka, I wanted to ask you first about the story for Green Borders.
Whether it's an amalgamation of sadly all too familiar stories of refugees and migrants, or whether it's a specific story because one of your characters refers to a Polish newspaper quite a lot in the film and I wondered whether it was perhaps taken from a newspaper story.
It is a mix of the stories.
No, one particular story wasn't literary translated to the to the film's character the most, the closest was the woman played by BEI Ajani, who is an Afghan English teacher.
And in reality that woman was Iraqi Kurdish English teacher, but very similar kind of the person and with a terrible experience over several pushbacks on the border and with very strong voice about it.