Director Agnieszka Holland's documentary Green Border exposes the horrific conditions and vile politics surrounding the realities facing migrants caught in a stretch of forested territory between Belarus and Poland.Agata Kubis/Supplied
Green Border
Directed by Agnieszka Holland
Written by Agnieszka Holland, Maciej Pisuk and Gabriela Lazarkiewicz-Sieczko
Starring Jalal Altawil, Maja Ostaszewska and Tomasz Wlosok
Classification N/A; 147 minutes
Opens in select theatres June 28
Critic’s Pick
In an interview the other week, Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland told me that she doesn’t believe her work, including the new refugee-crisis drama Green Border, can change the world. “When I was showing the film in France a few months ago, the same question came up. But one young girl stood up and said, ‘You haven’t changed the world, but you changed my world.’ I’m not interested in the crowds, but the individual.”
With all due respect to Holland’s sense of modesty, she might be slightly mistaken on this front. Because if enough people end up watching the masterful and soul-shaking Green Border – and absolutely everyone should, as soon as possible – the collective conscience of the world could very well shift, even just a bit. And sometimes a little bit is all we need to effect urgent change.
Shot quickly and in semi-secrecy – with a ferocity and anger slightly foreign to a filmmaker perhaps best known to North American audiences for her more polished and handsome dramas The Secret Garden and Washington Square – Holland’s new film swiftly and fearlessly exposes the horrific conditions and vile politics surrounding a stretch of forested territory between Belarus and Poland.
In 2021, Belarusian dictator and long-time Vladimir Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko played a cruel trick on the world, offering safe passage to the European Union for migrants fleeing the Middle East and Africa. But there was no benevolence in Lukashenko’s offer – it was merely a deceptive ploy to overburden Europe’s refugee resettlement programs, and antagonize neighbouring Poland and the wider EU. In retaliation, Warsaw’s troops began to punt the migrants, many of them Syrians fleeing the horrors of Bashar al-Assad, back to the treacherous borderland between Belarus – a heavily wooded area with deep swamps and subzero temperatures – in a deadly game of catch and release.
Holland’s film, shot in stark black and white, examines the situation through three distinct perspectives. The first follows a group of refugees, including one multigenerational Syrian family led by patriarch Bashir (Jalal Altawil) and his wife Amina (Dalia Naous), as they make their way to Minsk by air, the promise of a brighter European future ahead of them. But once the clan, including two young children and a baby, land and are transported by smugglers to the Polish border, they become pawns in a vicious geopolitical game.
The second narrative thread focuses on a Polish border guard named Janek (Tomasz Wlosok), who stands apart from his colleagues in that his mind hasn’t yet been completely poisoned by nationalistic propaganda that portrays the migrants as either subhuman rats or Putin-allied threats to Polish safety. (“They aren’t people, they are live bullets,” Janek hears from one of his supervisors during a training session.) Torn between his sense of patriotic duty and his unspoiled humanity, the expectant father comes face to face with a stark reality that not even his escalating alcoholism can soothe.
Finally, the film’s third viewpoint comes through Julia (Maja Ostaszewska), a middle-aged therapist who has moved to the Polish countryside in a bid to start a new life. But her quiet existence quickly becomes complicated when she rescues a member of Bashir’s cohort of migrants, and soon finds herself co-ordinating humanitarian missions with local activists under the threat of imprisonment from Polish authorities.
Relentlessly paced and fully embracing the appalling reality of life for those caught between the two borders – just as in reality, no character’s survival is guaranteed – Holland’s docudrama plays like a horror movie in which the bogeymen are you and me: comfortable citizens of rich, largely white countries who are comfortable ignoring those unlucky enough to be born in less privileged circumstances. Green Border is not only a courageous film, but a confident one: Holland knows that sometimes the only way to open the world’s eyes is to pry them open by force, with no softening of tone or sense of sentimentality.
Perhaps as a measure of its effectiveness, Holland’s work has already been labelled Putin-friendly propaganda by the Polish government, which was none too fond of how its border officers are portrayed. Preshow viewer-advisory warnings were also slapped on screenings when the film opened in Poland this past fall, to counter its supposed “untruths and distortions.”
Anticipating such a vitriolic response, Holland closes out Green Border with one hell of a gut-punch, contrasting Poland’s cruel response to the influx of Syrian and African migrants with its rather open-arm embrace of the largely white, Euro-friendly Ukrainian refugees fleeing Putin’s war of aggression. It turns out there are people worth saving, and people fit to be thrown away and forgotten about.