The three-times Oscar-nominated film director Agnieszka Holland has said her first foray into murder mystery had accidentally turned into an allegory of the divided society her native Poland has become under its populist nationalist government.
Holland said she and the author Olga Tokarczuk – whose novel Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead inspired Holland’s latest film, Pokot (Spoor) – had not set out to create a political film, but that they had inadvertently ended up telling a story about a male authoritarian agenda that attacked women’s rights and environmental protection, thereby reflecting the wider reality.
“A lot of things have happened that mirror the scenes in the movie but it was meant as a fantasy, so it seems like we had something of a premonition,” she said.
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.
“Spoor” means the track or trail of an animal that is being hunted, and tells the story of retired civil engineer, Duszejko, who has a penchant for astrology and lives a quiet life in a Polish mountain village on the Czech border, where she teaches English to children in her spare time. When her two dogs – her closest companions – go missing one day, Duszejko sets out to discover who is responsible for their disappearance. What unfolds is, as Holland describes it, an “anarchistic, feminist crime story with elements of black comedy”.
Holland said she and 55-year-old Tokarczuk, with whom she wrote the screenplay, had already been branded “targowiczanin” in Poland, a communist-era term meaning traitor.
Polish journalists who were in Berlin to review Spoor, scheduled for release in Polish cinemas on 24 February, were quick to condemn the film as hostile to their country.
“One journalist for the Polish news agency wrote that we had made a deeply anti-Christian film that promoted eco-terrorism. We read that with some satisfaction and we are thinking of putting it on the promotional posters, because it will encourage people who might otherwise not have bothered to come and see it,” Holland said.
Shooting parties and poaching are the main activities of the men in Duszejko’s village, reflecting its predominance in Poland. “The hunt is quite often the place where important political decisions are made. It’s like a boys’ club – I went to several hunts as research for the film and I saw a woman maybe once. The men are together and they feel free to talk, like Donald Trump does to his buddies about women and power. They can execute their power in a very direct way, by killing living creatures. They also take their sons with them so that they are sure to pass on the flame.”
Duszejko’s passionate opposition to the hunts defines the story, which Holland said is “a bit like a fairytale about anger”. “Anger is a very dangerous thing, and those big men with power are playing with the anger of people. Danger is like a fire. It keeps you warm and you can make your food on it, but it can also burn your house down.”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.”
She said recent large-scale demonstrations in Poland, where women turned out in their thousands to protest against the government’s plan to ban abortion, “were dominated by older women, who feel they have to defend the freedom of their daughters – and sons”.
Similarly, Duszejko takes care of the younger and weaker in her environment. “She is not just thinking of her family, but of the voiceless wider world,” Holland said.
The film-maker started her career as an assistant to Andrzej Wajda and has collaborated with Krzysztof Kieślowski. More recently, she has directed several TV series including The Wire, The Killing and House of Cards. She said she would not rule out making a film about Brexit, recognising the similarities between Brexit supporters and those of the Law and Justice party. “They’re mainly white men who feel deprived of their power, their possessions, who’ve been the gods of the universe and now they’re not. To me Brexit is a disaster that has triggered disintegration, and God knows where it will lead,” she said.
“The Polish right supported Brexit, not openly, but they were really happy it happened – to show these stupid liberals that they’re fucking losing. But it’s like turkeys voting for Thanksgiving, because the Poles will be the first victims of Brexit.”
She added: “One Polish guy in Britain was killed and several were beaten. The Poles in Britain are living in insecurity now and don’t know what will happen to them. There could be a film in it for me. Ken Loach has too strong a belief in social justice for him to make it, whereas I’m much more pessimistic about humanity.”
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