Although it could not have been planned that way, the forty-eighth Polish Film Festival will stand as one of the last cultural monuments of the outgoing far-right government that has ruled over the country since 2015. Along with socially intolerant and ultra-Catholic anti-immigration and anti-abortion policies, the Law and Justice party and its allies have promoted a version of Polish history that highlighted individual nationalist heroism, and downplayed, revised, distorted, or denied more awkward examples of collective complicity, such as the many historical instances of antisemitism in Poland. This promotion took many forms, from legislating against historical facts pointing to Polish participation in the Holocaust to removing dissident directors and curators from museums and other cultural centers. Most significantly in the context of the festival, the government promoted its worldview by controlling the finance of films and television.

Crossposted from !movies@kbin.social