Green Border
Zielona granica

We can always count on the great seventy-five-year-old Polish director Agnieszka Holland to deliver complex, angry, and hard-hitting, yet entertaining (and even optimistic) politically-charged filmmaking in an era where most "political movies" are calculated to ensure they don’t enflame viewers on any side of any issue—I'm looking at you Alex Garland, but Civil War is only the most recent and egregious example of the sad, multi-decade-long trend. Green Border isn't some fantasy "what-if" scenario about a war that might come; it's a harsh depiction of a worldwide hidden war that's been underway for many years. The film is based on real-life events that took place along the Polish-Belarus border in 2021 when Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko opened a migratory route into the European Union through his country as a means of weaponizing asylum-seekers and destabilizing the EU.

The movie is a perspective-shifting suspense drama that begins with a Syrian family conned into crossing the titular swampy, wooded no-man's-land by the promise of safe passage. They soon become part of a loose collective of desperate people tricked by Lukashenko's propaganda campaign, which was designed to flood the EU with poor, starving migrants to stir up anti-immigrant sentiment. The plan worked, and the border guards who patrol both sides hunt down and abuse those trying to make their way to a safe, peaceful, "civilized nation." The family quickly finds themselves trapped with dozens of others between the Belarus military and the Polish border guards who treat them like political ping-pong balls, swatting them back and forth across the border. Leila, a former English teacher from Afghanistan, played by Behi Djanati Atai, becomes the de facto leader of these folks. She has undertaken the journey alone, and her lack of little kids or elderly parents to drag along, not to mention her fluency in English, might be why she fares better than most of her fellow travelers, but then it might just be the luck of the draw. Regardless, she is soon separated from the group with a young boy in her care.

The soldiers on both sides seem to have been given free will by their respective governments to treat these people as disposable pawns in an undeclared war, driving them back and forth across the fenced perimeter that divides the territory between Poland and the Baltic states. We get to know one of these Polish border guards. Jan (Tomasz Włosok) is a young man who, like most of his comrades, is so traumatized by his role in this campaign of dehumanization that he has become an alcoholic who attempts to shut down his emotions so he can do the job he signed up for. He's about to become a father and, struggling with the moral implications of having to "just follow orders," is troubled about bringing new life into such a physically and psychologically destructive environment.

A little less than halfway through this harrowing two-and-a-half-hour picture, we meet Julia, a recently widowed psychologist played by Maja Ostaszewska. Julia is from the privileged class and is hardly what you'd call an activist, but she quickly becomes radicalized by her experiences rescuing, housing, and hiding Leila. Her nicely appointed home soon becomes a kind of safe house for a group of Poles who launch campaigns into the forests to bring humanitarian aid to the wounded and terrified refugees. The actions of these activists are branded as criminal by Poland's right-wing government, so they are all placing themselves at risk of prosecution and imprisonment. Julia seems as out of place with these radical anarchists as the unwashed asylum seekers seem in her pristine home environment.

When Julia actively confronts what she and the wealthy clients she serves all view as an obvious injustice, the film turns from an intense and depressing qazi-documentary of horrific realities to an exciting and oddly optimistic escape thriller. That's a welcome turn, as Holland specializes in telling brutal, upsetting stories without ever forgetting why audiences go to movies or the unique power of narrative feature films. These days, we are starved for entertainment that explores the complex realities of what's happening in the world without the comforting distance of genre metaphor and without sugarcoating how horrible the realities are or stripping out all specifics to render a story meaningless. Hollywood used to make true political pictures all the time before the studios were all owned by algorithms. Now, we only get this type of movie from well-established filmmakers willing to bite the hands that feed them.

Poland's leaders have condemned Green Border and Holland herself. Many have called the film a disgrace and likened the director to Soviet and Nazi propagandists who sought to destroy the image of Poland and the Polish people. But Holland is an impeccable researcher who dives deep into her subject matter. She tells her story from a specific political perspective, for certain, but that doesn't render something propaganda. She and her co-writers, Maciej Pisuk and Gabriela Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko, interviewed and collaborated with countless refugees and activists involved in the situation along the border from 2021 to 2023 when Poland was led by the Law and Justice party, which built the fences and barriers along the border with Belarus and legislated for the possibility of immediate returns for anyone found entering Polish territory without permission in response to Lukashenko's plan to flood the country with migrants. Several Polish border guards also provided anonymous testimonies about their experiences during this time. And Green Border is a film that paints the policies it showcases as horrible, not the people. The movie is filled with compassionate, heroic Poles risking their lives trying to make a difference to one degree or another. Tomek Naumiuk's sharp monochrome cinematography might recall countless movies about the Holocaust, the Polish people, and the situations they find themselves in are never presented in simplistic black-and-white terms.

Holland may be training her lens on her native country, but this film is not designed to point the figure at one nation's policies. Watching Green Border, we are only too aware of the similar situations that exist between the United States and Mexico, in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and worldwide. The refugee situation is only going to get worse and this film asks us to think about what can be done in response. Is the answer for our policies to become even more brutal and sadistic? And why don't we treat all asylum-seekers the same? Green Border's coda asks that last question in the starkest and most undeniable way. Some of Agnieszka Holland's best pictures are Holocaust dramas that showcase humanity's capacity for endurance over our potential for cruelty, like her international breakout Angry Harvest (1985), her star-making Europa, Europa (1990), and her best work on the subject, In Darkness (2011). Her latest film showcases how respect for human rights today has plunged to a level not seen since those terrible years when fascism ruled, but also how humanity has not died out in the hearts and minds of the citizenry. It is a riveting, angry, compassionate thriller that respects the viewer's intelligence and the subjects' dignity.