Photo: Kino Lorber/Everett Collection
Agnieszka Holland’s Green border opens with a wide shot of an endless expanse of trees – the densely forested, almost primitive area marking the border between Belarus and Poland where much of the film will take place. Slowly, the color disappears from the image and the green border becomes an inhospitable expanse of black and white. Holland said she chose black and white for her epic refugee drama, winner of international awards and a controversial hit at home (where it was denounced by Poland’s right-wing government of the time), to giving it a timeless quality. But as we watch the color disappear from the screen, we might think of something else: a distillation, a reduction of the image (and everything that follows) to its dark essence. Green border forces us to confront raw human behavior, devoid of all subtlety and posturing.
The specific period Holland chose to address was itself the result of a cynical political plan to exploit a sad underlying reality. In 2021, in response to European Union sanctions following his fake election the previous year, Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko threatened to flood the continent with refugees. He then encouraged migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia to travel to Belarus and enter the EU via its borders. He wanted not only to punish Europe, but also to expose what he saw as the hypocrisy behind its promises of liberal tolerance. (This is a tactic borrowed by some right-wing politicians here in the United States)
You could say he succeeded, to a certain extent. Thus began a particularly cruel game of political football, with real, terrified humans caught in the middle, as Polish authorities immediately began sending refugees back through barbed wire, only to be forced back into Poland by Belarusian soldiers, often at at gunpoint, etc. Among the many interviews Holland (along with co-authors Maciej Pisuk and Gabriela Lazarkiewicz) conducted as part of his extensive research before making Green border was one with a man who had crossed the border 26 times. “Everything that happens in the movie is documented,” she told my colleague Rachel Handler last year. “Nothing is invented.”
This is a terrifying statement, because the cruelties inflicted on the people in this image are beyond evil: starving refugees coerced into bribes and robbed blind; thirsty men forced to drink from broken glass; children torn from their families; sick old men beaten to a pulp; a heavily pregnant woman thrown over a fence like a sack of potatoes; freezing and the wounded left to die in the cold. Holland is a humanist and not a sadist, so she does not dwell on these actions. But she also does not hesitate to let us witness such horrors in the intimate urgency of her cinema.
She is a director who, over the course of her career, has been particularly sensitive to the plight of stateless and homeless people, to the in-between souls who feel like outsiders everywhere. A critic of Poland’s communist regime, she became one of the country’s most accomplished filmmakers before emigrating to Western Europe, where she made films like EuropeEurope (1990) and Angry Harvest (1985) about desperate people on the run. Such subjects certainly lend themselves to drama, but Dutch cinema is also characterized by the breadth of its vision. His camera is at home among the oppressed as well as those who walk all over them. It includes both the passionate agitator and the helpless observer.
Green border is divided into several chapters, each offering a different point of view. First, we follow a group of refugees, a Syrian family and an Afghan teacher (Behi Djanati Atai), as they arrive by plane in Belarus, hoping that they will eventually make their way to Sweden and elsewhere. After observing their horrific treatment at the border, Holland falls into the daily life of Jan (Tomasz Wlosok), a young Polish cop with a baby on the way. We see the indoctrination he and others receive from their superiors. “These aren’t people, these are live bullets,” a bigwig told the assembled troops, framing their efforts as part of a broader fight against Poland’s external enemies. We see the smiling swagger of the border guards, who overcome their anxieties by drinking themselves into oblivion and cultivating particularly tough fronts. (As part of his research, Holland spoke to numerous border guards, some of whom secretly confided to him their disgust at what they were being asked to do.)
The director’s vision is not entirely devoid of hope, even if it is a rather bleak hope. One chapter follows a group of activists who attempt to meet the refugees’ basic needs, while trying to stay within the confines of the law: they cannot enter the protected area where most of the aforementioned atrocities are taking place; they cannot accommodate or move any of the refugees; if requesting medical assistance, border guards must accompany doctors, which in many cases simply means that the patient will be sent back to Belarus, regardless of their health status. We then meet Julia (Maja Ostaszewska), a widowed psychotherapist, who one night comes across a woman and child drowning in a swamp in the woods and gets involved in a way that goes beyond what the activists are ready to do. But Julia is not the norm. When she asks to borrow a friend’s car to help transport refugees, he refuses – even though he says she has strong progressive bona fides, just like Julia.
Holland’s structure allows us to experience these different perspectives while continuing to follow the characters’ progression, but his approach also comes with a sharp poison pill: we lose sight of these people for periods of time – and when we come back to it, we are often deeply shocked. A major character disappears from the picture only to appear later, briefly, as a corpse in the night, anonymous to everyone else on screen but not to us. This is a particularly wise decision on the part of the Netherlands. With chilling recognition, we realize that for those of us watching at home, such soulless glimpses are the norm. These humans come to us in the form of corpses, of statistics, of distant images of families destroyed on street corners, of men arrested by the cops and captured in the bright, brief glare of cell phone cameras. By reproducing the process of dehumanization, the film form forces us to confront our own inaction. Green border is unforgettable, in every sense of the word.