Leave it to Belarus, that eternal hotbed of human rights violations, and specifically to dictator Alexander Lukashenko, to fan the flames of the European migrant crisis, now nearly 10 years on. In 2021, Lukashenko promised to destabilize the European Union by flooding it with migrants. Lured by promises of easy access to the EU, refugees fleeing their hostile, war-torn countries are flown into Minsk, then driven to the Polish border. Once there, Belarusian troops helpfully raise up the razor wire for space to crawl through: Please don’t mind the gunfire, but do mind tearing your coat on that barb there, and you may want to run as fast as you can before the Polish border patrol arrives. Well done, you’ve crossed a green border, so named for the presence of vegetation, yes, but also its general absence of security.
Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border begins with such a flight, sleepy passengers and restless children, quiet murmurs of conversation. Bashir (Altawil) and Amina (Naous) are fleeing Syria with their two young children and infant, along with Bashir’s father. The family’s destination is Sweden, where Bashir’s brother lives. Transportation has been both confirmed and paid for, cell phone pings have been dropped and locations saved. The fell omens begin with the bus driver demanding extra money at the border, and quite quickly, the bottom falls out beneath them. Scurrying into the forest of Eastern Poland, the family are soon caught by border guards and quickly hauled back through the barbed wire to Belarus, where they are captured again and thrown back over the border to Poland, caught in some hellish game of ping pong.
The film also follows one of the Polish border guards, Jan (Włosok), a young man with a pregnant wife Kasia (Buss) and maybe a bit more of a conscience than his fellow patrolmen. As Jan drinks to forget the horrible duties of his work, such as hoisting over the border any dead bodies found in the forest, Kasia tries to offer comfort and support, while pointing out she can identify her husband in activists’ videos uploaded on the internet by his uniform number. Which is the third point of entry for Green Border: the activists, here led by two sisters Marta (Frajczyk) and Zuku (Polak), with newcomer Julia (Ostaszewska) joining up, a psychiatrist whose presence becomes instrumental in the group’s increasingly dangerous humanitarian endeavors.
At 75, Holland has amassed a body of work of such depth it’s downright daunting. Early masterpieces Angry Harvest and Europa Europa, her TV work with The Wire and The Killing, and recent standouts like Spoor and Mr. Jones are mere starting points to her fascinating career. Holland has honed an impressive ability to sustain nerve-fraying tension, and her brutal, field-level depictions of trauma orchestrated by oppressive political structures seeking to manipulate the hearts and minds of some, while dehumanizing others renders Green Border an angry, visceral masterpiece. And while its relatively upbeat ending is a muted one, Holland shows that the embers of compassion haven’t yet been entirely stamped out of our collective psyche.
This article appears in August 16 • 2024.