Green Border

The painful struggle of refugees seeking a better life is urgently depicted in Agnieszka Holland’s film about migrants trapped in the thick forest on the border between Poland and Belarus.

The versatile Polish director and screenwriter Agnieszka Holland has been a filmmaker for almost 55 years. She’s continued to be a presence in world cinema, but I admit I didn’t expect her to make her greatest film at the age of 75. I’m talking about her most recent work: Green Border, a terrific drama about the struggle of migrants and refugees to seek a new home in Europe.

The “green border” is a nickname for the thick forests that span the border between Poland and Belarus. In 2021, a Syrian family—parents, three children, and a grandfather—have taken an opportunity offered by a relative to fly to Minsk, in Belarus. They are picked up by a truck that is supposed to take them to Poland, where they will meet someone assigned to get them to Sweden, a country that accepts Syrian refugees. The truck driver, however, stops at a checkpoint, demands money, and then drops them off in the forest in Poland. Thus begins a nightmare in which Polish border guards capture them and put them back in Belarus, only for them to be forced across the border again by Belarusian troops, with the cycle repeating over and over.

In a brief shot at the beginning of the film, we see the bright green forest from the air, after which the picture switches to black and white for the duration, like a transition from hope to suffering and despair. I must say, first of all, that if you don’t want to be upset, and horrified, don’t watch Green Border, or rather watch it some time when you’re willing to endure the stress for the sake of a deeper understanding.

The fear and confusion of a family, trying to protect their kids, being thrust into a seemingly endless wilderness is vivid enough, but the terrible cruelty and abuse of the border guards on either side raises the tension level to an almost unbearable extreme. It’s all based on actual events on this border, in which neither government wanted to help refugees, but instead beat and terrorized them, giving them nowhere to go, and nothing to do but die. This is not a unique story either, but a shamefully common one that we’ve witnessed on many borders, including our own.

In the second part of the film, we follow the Polish border guards, mostly from the perspective of a single young officer who participates in the general cruelty as part of his job, but grows more alienated from what he’s doing as time goes on. Part Three concerns “the activists”: young Poles who go into the forest to bring food, clothes, and medicine to the refugees. The fourth and final part of the film is called “Julia,” about a psychologist, played by Maja Ostaszewska, who has not paid much attention to politics, but gets an awakening when she hears a call for help from a refugee. Then we witness her evolution into a member of the resistance.

The acting, and the coordination of so many characters within a complex realistic story, is superb. We feel the raw emotion, the fear and rage and grief, of the people caught in this trap. The overwhelming conviction one gets from this movie is that a fixation on borders, even to the point of leaving people to die of starvation, thirst, and violence, is absolutely evil. As intense as Green Border is, its message is not finally a despairing one. We see that goodness still exists in the human heart, and we know that despite all the crime and injustice, there are still people willing to put everything on the line to help others.