The ruling, issued by the District Court in Warsaw, concerns comments Ziobro made in 2023 about Holland and her film Green Border, which deals with a migrant crisis on Poland’s border with Belarus.
According to lawyers representing Holland, the court found that Ziobro violated the director’s personal rights by comparing her work to Nazi and Soviet propaganda.
Under the first-instance ruling, he must post an apology on X in which he acknowledges repeated violations of her good name, dignity, artistic work and reputation.
The court also ordered him to pay PLN 50,000 (around EUR 12,000) to the Children of the Holocaust Association, a group that brings together Holocaust survivors who at the outbreak of World War II were 13 years of age or younger, or were born during the war, and works to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and Jewish life in Poland.
The dispute began in the fall of 2023, when Ziobro, then serving as justice minister in the Law and Justice (PiS) government, attacked Holland and her film on social media.
In one post, he suggested that Nazi Germany had once used propaganda films to portray Poles as criminals and that “today they have Agnieszka Holland for that.”
In another, he wrote that Soviet and Nazi propagandists had used film to destroy Poland’s image, adding that the authors had changed but the methods had not.
Holland responded by filing a civil lawsuit for the protection of personal rights, a legal procedure in Poland used in cases involving damage to reputation, dignity or other nonmaterial interests.
Her lawyer, Sylwia Gregorczyk-Abram, said the case may still lead to an appeal because one member of the judicial panel was appointed through what critics describe as a flawed procedure involving the National Council of the Judiciary (KRS), the body that recommends judges for appointment.
Lawyers for Holland had sought that person’s exclusion from the case from the start of the proceedings.
Holland is one of Poland's most internationally acclaimed film directors and screenwriters. Her Green Border deals with humanitarian and political tensions surrounding a migration crisis engineered by the Belarusian regime and exacerbated by actions of the Polish government.
British newspaper The Guardian called the film a "formidable, furious masterpiece." Green Border won the Special Jury Prize at the 80th Venice International Film Festival. It became one of Poland’s most politically charged films in 2023, condemned by officials in the right-wing government at the time.
(rt/gs)
Source: IAR, PAP