Migrant. Refugee. Immigrant. Hot button labels for people seeking something better—perhaps work, safety, asylum. Polish film director Agnieszka Holland plunges her audience into a hell on earth at the border of Belarus and Poland for a Syrian family of six. Grandpa, his son, daughter-in-law, and their three young children are handed roses just as their plane is about to land as a welcome to Belarus. A woman traveling alone asks to join in the van that will take the family to the Polish border.
In the setup to this film, the plane flies over a colorfully green forest. Then the color disappears, and the picture becomes black and white. In the parlance of international politics, a green border is an area of a national border with little protection, often a forest or other overgrown terrain. In 2021, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko endeavored to destabilize the European Union by flooding Poland with migrants who were promised easy travel from Belarus to Poland. According to globalvoices.org in an article dated June 30, 2024, this border problem persists.
In Holland’s film, the migrants are shunted back and forth violently by the Polish and Belarussian border patrols. Volunteers try to provide first aid, clothing, water, and food, but are hampered in their efforts by police limitations that might land them in jail. This included a warning to avoid a two-mile-wide exclusion zone at the border and a prohibition against transporting migrants.
Structurally, the story is told from various points of view: the migrants (emphasizing the Syrian family’s plight and that of the savvy Afghan woman who joins them), the Polish Border patrol, the Belarussian Border Patrol, the Polish activists, the female psychologist who joins the activists and is arrested by the Polish police, and the young Polish border patrol agent who turns from brutality to permissiveness when he allows migrants hiding in a truck to pass his checkpoint.
The film consists of a stream of imagery that never slows for explanation. We see Leila, the Afghan woman (Behi Djanati Atai), screaming for help, as she sinks up to her neck in a swamp and tries to hold up the unconscious Syrian boy before he drowns. All we know is that the child escaped the Polish Border Patrol (and his parents). Leila, who has become a doting aunt to him and his siblings, teaching them English and quieting the crying baby, risks her own life to protect the boy. Julia, the psychologist (Maja Ostaszewska) who lives near this swamp then rescues Leila by getting her an ambulance to a hospital. But there is no happy ending for Leila. Julia watches helplessly as Leila, barely awake, is nabbed from the hospital bed by Polish authorities and taken back to the border. We are left to guess that the body of a woman found near the border and tossed back into Belarus is Leila’s.
The Polish government has done what it can to discredit Holland’s film by comparing it to Nazi propaganda films. At 75, Holland, whose work includes films about the Nazi holocaust such as Europa, Europa, undertook to make a contemporary film based on reality and immediacy. Her co-writers were secretly able to speak to border guards and some of her actors are actual Syrian refugees. Green Border is a gut-wrenching film, artfully told.
