A single apple to feed a family, passed among its members like contraband. The existential utility of a partially charged cellphone. A $200 bottle of water. The things they carry, and the things they leave behind—whether a suitcase of valuables or the elders too weak, too injured or too exhausted to continue the journey. These are the considerations of the Middle Eastern and African refugees whose pitiless odysseys, into morasses both physical and political, are presented with reportorial honesty in Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s brave and trenchant Green Border, opening Friday in Lake Worth Beach.
The “green border” of the title refers to the weakly protected no-man’s-land between Belarus and Poland, a forested barrier dividing a Russian puppet state from a European Union nation, the latter carrying with it implicit protections for refugees. But as the family of migrants at the heart of Green Border comes to realize, the difference between the nations’ immigration policies isn’t as sharp as the barbed wire bisecting the muddy territories. For Syrian father and husband Bashir (Jalal Altawil) and his family — and Leila, an Afghani mother (Behi Djanati Atai) who joins them with her young daughter — what has been broadcast, in a carefully calibrated multinational propaganda campaign as an easy crossing from Belarus to Poland to the welcoming arms of Sweden becomes a nightmare of subsistence and survival.
As the refugees are captured and passed, like so many stateless footballs, between Belarus and Poland, it becomes difficult to distinguish between friend and foe. The immigrants occupy a blurry purgatory, half in a former Soviet republic whose antidemocratic leader, Alexander Lukashenko, is name-checked numerous times in Holland’s screenplay; and half in an E.U. mirage that has embraced an equally pernicious xenophobia, a kind of “Poland for the Polish” mentality. As they are herded like cattle from truck to van to prison-like camp, Leila’s anguished cry of “Why are you doing this to us?” goes unanswered. The cruelty is the point.
Set in 2021, Green Border is certainly among Holland’s most vital cris de coeur in a career that has mostly settled in the comfortable mainstream, as a journeywoman director of crime dramas and American prestige television. Her latest is more in line with her earlier, more politically charged work, films unafraid to criticize her own government—1982’s Interrogation, 1985’s Angry Harvest.
After a single, full-color aerial shot of the movie’s setting, Holland switches to a stark, ominous black-and-white for the remainder of its two-and-a-half hours, enhancing the inhospitableness of the situation. Yet the film does not wallow in bleakness. As it progresses, its vision expands from two families’ fights for freedom into a mosaic of various players involved in their plight: predominantly Jan (Tomasz Wlosok), a Polish border guard who faces a crisis of conscience; and Julia (Maja Ostaszewska), a widowed counselor who falls in with an NGO that provides food and medical care — and perhaps more —to the refugees.
Julia’s evolution from bystander to activist provides the most moving counter to the state-sanctioned atrocities Green Border exposes. Almost overnight, she becomes a conductor of sorts in an underground railroad of helpers that spirits migrants to safer climes. While trying to grow their efforts, she is aghast that her normie friend, an ostensible liberal, won’t provide a car to assist in the refugees’ transport. “Helping is not illegal!” Julia asserts, quaintly. But it’s this very naivety that allows Julia, and us, to imagine a better life for the poor, tired, huddled masses under her care.
Holland closes the film with an epilogue set in early 2022, when the first wave of Ukrainians flee the damage wrought by Russia’s “special military operation.” The geography may be different, but the desperation of the displaced has a familiar echo; it’s the same one that reverberates on our own, not-so-green border with Mexico. This is why Holland’s film resonates so deeply beyond its place and time. Some build walls to separate us; others drop bombs. National borders may be individualized, but dehumanization is, tragically, universal.
GREEN BORDER. Director: Agnieszka Holland; Cast: Jalal Altawil, Maja Ostaszewska, Tomasz Włosok, Behi Djanati Atai, Mohamad Al Rashi; Distributor: Kino Lorber
Opens: Friday, Aug. 9 at Lake Worth Playhouse’s Stonzek Theater; Not Rated; In Polish, Arabic, Russian and English with English subtitles