20 February 2017

The Guardian: Agnieszka Holland: Pokot reflects divided nature of Polish society

The 68-year-old, whose first international hit was in 1990 with Europa, Europa, which concerned a young Polish Jew who disguises himself as a member of the Hitler Youth to survive, said: “There’s a cultural counter-revolution going on, which we see with Jarosław Kaczyński [the de facto leader of Poland], as well as in Russia and the US, which is represented by men who have a populist authoritarian agenda that places women’s rights and nature preservation in the front line of attack,” she said in an interview with the Guardian at the Berlin film festival, where her film had its world premiere this week.

Women’s rights and ecology have been two areas under attack since the rightwing Law and Justice party took power in 2016. Among many controversial moves, the government has sought to introduce an all-out abortion ban, as well as relaxing laws that protect swaths of Europe’s last remaining primeval forests. [...]

Holland said the protagonist embodied many disillusioned women of her generation “who are very rational, working as engineers or scientists, who reject the official religion that became very politically corrupt and has little to do with Jesus Christ. But at some point they start to have the need to connect to something like astrology, yoga or zen. It’s the above-55 generation who believed in progress and in the freedom that came with the collapse of communism, and the fact they could take things into their own hands, but who have now lost this hope.”

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