Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border opens with arial shots of a majestic ancient, the camera swooping over the tops of towering green trees framed by a cloudless blue sky. This is the “green border” of the title: the forested region between Belarus and Poland which has become a battleground in one of the many international disputes involving borders, refugees, and claims of asylum. The beauty doesn’t last, however—the film quickly switches to black and white, where it will stay for the rest of its running time, a choice highlighting the fact that this border is anything but picturesque in the eyes of the refugees attempting to cross it to enter the European Union (EU).
Holland,* who co-wrote the screenplay with Gabriela Lazarkiewicz-Sieczko and Maciej Pisuk, focuses on three groups of stakeholders in Green Border: refugees attempting to cross from Belarus into Poland, Polish soldiers whose job it is to keep them out, and civilian volunteers who attempt to aid the refugees.
While I understand the impetus to give each group cinematic representation, and to give probable audience members the chance to identify with someone who looks like them, it makes the film (which runs over two and a half hours) too long and dilutes the story of the refugees who are the primary victims in the geopolitical situation dramatized in this film. Of course Green Border could end up being the epic movie that solves the international migration crisis, in which case I’d really be embarrassed for reading the room so poorly, but my feelings are that Green Border is a good film, and an important film, but too punishing an experience to achieve the kind of popularity needed to reach such lofty goals.
The first people we meet in Green Border are an extended family from Syria on a Turkish airplane taking them, or so they believe, to new lives in Europe. The father of the family is played by Jalal Altawil, a refugee from Syria, and the grandfather by Mohamad Al Rashi, also a Syrian refugee, so they’re playing characters whose experiences they know well. Once on the ground, their group is joined by a woman from Afghanistan who is traveling alone, for the simple reason that there’s room in their van for her.
The refugees think they’re on the road to a new life in a peaceful country, but quickly learn that they have been tricked into playing a game few of them will be able to win. Having come so far, they find themselves locked in a dangerous and unproductive cycle of being passed back and forth between Poland and Belarus. Add in the beatings and insults they must endure, along with even greater risks like drowning in the swampy borderland, and it’s clear that the longer they have to play, the more likely it becomes that they will lose. Besides the obvious suffering engendered by this policy, the refugees find it simply baffling, declaring that if a stranger showed up in their village, they’d be offered hospitality, no questions asked.
The Polish and Belarussian soldiers are mostly portrayed as despicable individuals who toy with the asylum seekers but are humanized through the character of Jan (Tomas Wlosok), a young soldier who will soon become a father and who is forced to grapple with the implications of doing what you are told when the foreseeable outcome of those orders is horribly cruel. The volunteers are exemplified by Julia (Maja Ostazewska), a psychiatrist who becomes involved in helping the refugees after she responds to a distress call by a group of refugees near her home.
Green Border makes an interesting pairing with Maciek Hamela’s documentary In the Rearview, which captures the experiences of people fleeing the front lines of the war in Ukraine courtesy of a van driven by the director and his cameraman. The destination of these refugees is also Poland, which has accepted over two and a half million refugees from Ukraine since the Russian invasion. What is the difference between those refugees, and the ones whose stories lie behind the plot of this film? I suspect mainly good old-fashioned racism: the Ukrainians are European, while the people crossing from Belarus come primarily from the Middle East (Syria and Afghanistan for the primary group we follow in Green Border) and Africa.
The desire to control nation borders is another factor: Poland made a choice to accept Ukrainian refugees, while the refugees entering from Belarus are being forced on them by the policies of Aleksandr Lukashenko, president of Belarus. Lukashenko, observing the less than welcoming reactions of many EU countries to refugees from Europe and the Middle East, offered free transit visas and transportation to the Polish border to refugees from those areas. It was a smart political move, if also unspeakably cruel: Lukashenko offered transit visas was because he didn’t want the refugees to stay in Belarus, and he knew most of them wouldn’t want to stay there anyway. Because Belarus shares a border with Poland, which is part of the EU, he also knew that the refuges would intend to cross that border, and also that Poland would reject the role of accepting so many refugees at once, particularly if they were ethnically different. Ultimately, Lukashenko’s goal was to destabilize EU countries, not to help the refugees, but however you figure it the real losers remain the refugees, who had the least power to begin with.
If you watch Green Border and think it’s entirely about what’s happening in a single geographic location, you have missed an important point. International migration is one of the key issues of our day, and Americans have no right to look down on how other countries handle asylum seekers. If you don’t believe me, consider what’s been happening at our border with Mexico, then consider how much larger and richer the United States is than Poland. Also contemplate how many television campaign ads for Missouri politicians (which I was reluctantly exposed to by watching the Olympics on broadcast TV) have prominently featured the border wall which is a long, long way from us, raising the question of why this seems to be such a hot-button issue in our fair city. | Sarah Boslaugh
*Since this film criticizes Poland, it’s probably worth mentioning that Holland is Polish. Also of interest: her previous films include the Nazi-era drama Europa Europa, which focused on a single Jewish boy’s successful mission to survive an environment in which death was the most probable outcome for him.
Green Border is available for screening on VOD.
