Director Agnieska Holland comes from the generation of post-war filmmakers who grew up under a totalitarian regime in Poland. The ghosts of injustice and oppression have haunted her lengthy body of work—from Academy Award-nominated “Europa, Europa” (1992), about a Jewish boy who joins the Nazi youth, to “Secret Garden” (1993), about a young orphaned girl trying to find her place in English society, and “Burning Bush” (2013), a protest against the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1969. She has worked in Poland, Europe, and America, in television and films. Now, true to form, “Green Border,” her latest window on the world’s atrocities, is an unflinching look at the barbaric treatment of refugees in Poland.
The title “Green Border” refers to a no-man’s land between Poland and Belarus, one of the last primeval forests in Europe. In 2021, refugees by the thousands were lured to Belarus from the Middle East and Africa with the promise of easy crossing to European countries and the EU. But no sooner do these people arrive than they are dragged through a barbed wire fence and dumped in the thick of the Polish woods. The Poles regard them as “human bullets” sent by Putin in order to create commotion in Polish society, and take them back. So these desperate, starving people are bounced back and forth between the two countries, pawns in this cruel geo-political chess game.
Shot in luminous black and white (except for an opening aerial shot in color) with a moving camera that roams through the trees and swampland behind the increasingly demoralized refugees, the film plays almost like a documentary and, in fact, all of the action is based on real events. Holland, who wrote the screenplay with Gabriela Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko and Maciej Pisuk, understands that the way into the complexities of the big issues is through specific, well-drawn characters. Because we are asked to experience the horrors and dehumanization of these characters, we must first feel for them.
The film starts out in Belarus with an exiled Syrian family trying to make its way to relatives in Sweden. The father (Jalal Aterwil) is so despondent that the work of keeping the family together—two small children and a vigorous and religious grandfather (Mohamad Al Rashi)—falls to the mother Amina (Dalia Naous), as it often does. An Afghan English teacher, Leila (Behi Djanati Atai), joins them and along with fellow sufferers, the family is the first piece of a trifurcated story.
On the other side of the fence are the Polish border guards, brainwashed into believing that the refugees are vermin who threaten their way of life. The guards are emboldened by righteous fury from their county’s leaders, which only serves to enflame the situation.
The random cruelty dosed out by the guards on both sides debases them as much as it does their victims. A belligerent Belarus guard offers Leila a bottle of water for 50 euros and then takes it back and slaps her. A young Polish guard, Jan (Tomasz Włosok), whose wife is expecting their first child, starts out thinking he is doing his duty by serving his country. But the more he sees the more his humanity is tested and in the end he makes a dangerous moral decision.
The refugees versus the border guards are the two forces in head-on conflict. Caught in the middle are the Polish resistance fighters—largely women—who do what they can to help and heal the immigrants with limited resources and even fewer choices about what they can legally get away with. When conditions become so bad that bodies are left abandoned in the forest to die of hypothermia and starvation, Julia (Maja Ostaszewska), a middle-aged psychologist, joins the resistance in an attempt to save a few forlorn souls, a move that threatens her career and safety.
The commitment is clear for the resistant fighters but the ramifications are not simple. One of Julia’s neighbors takes back a car she lent her after she realizes it’s being used to aid the refugees. The people have been conditioned to believe the refugees are the enemy and best not to get involved in their struggle.
Holland reveals just how deep this web of fascism goes, how it takes root, how it spreads, and how it plays out. The first step is creating otherness—the refugees do not look like us, and are, in fact, subhuman. Fear is exploited here for power, as it is around the world. And in this case, all roads lead to Putin. Belarus, presumably acting at the behest of Russia, has generated a man-made tragedy. Chaos, unrest and racism in a society is the soil out of which totalitarian rule takes and holds power.
Interestingly, in a postscript that highlights the absurdity of the Belarus crisis, Holland shows Poland responding to another refugee crisis, the war in the Ukraine. In this case, Poland accepts millions of people into the country, assisted by some of the very same border guards who earlier had crushed the Syrians at the border. The Ukrainians are apparently welcomed because they are white, which makes the events portrayed at the Green Border seem even more ugly.
Many of the actors whom Holland cast were themselves refugees and that surely lends an aura of authenticity to the film. The performances carry the weight of history. And Holland’s precise staging of the action down to the smallest detail makes the film seem so real that the far-right Polish government was compelled to denounce it as “Nazi propaganda.” The Minister of the Interior was so offended that he ordered a short film to be played at the start of all showings of “Green Border” in Polish theaters. For a born provocateur like Holland, that’s a job well done.
