SHREWSBURY FILM SOCIETY
| Director | Agnieszka Holland |
|---|---|
| Country | Poland |
| Year | 2023 |
Green Border, written and directed by Agnieszka Holland and co-written with Maciej Pisuk and Gabriela Lazarkiewicz-Sieczko, premiered in the main competition at the Venice International Film Festival in September 2023, where it won the Special Jury Prize. The black-and-white drama takes a harrowing look at the manufactured refugee crisis unfolding along the Poland–Belarus border from 2021 onwards. The film stirred intense political controversy in Poland—right-wing leaders accused it of propaganda, with one minister comparing it to Nazi-era films; Holland has responded by demanding an apology or legal action.
The narrative unfolds through four overlapping strands. First, a Syrian family—including Bashir, Amina, their children, and Bashir’s elderly father—makes a perilous trek through swamps toward the EU, only to be violently bounced between Polish and Belarusian border forces, trapped in a Kafkaesque no-man’s land. Next, we follow Janek, a young border guard conflicted by duty and conscience, whose nightly schnapps and domestic troubles reveal his inner crisis. The third strand focuses on activists risking imprisonment to bring food, medical aid, and empathy to refugees stranded in the wilderness. Finally, Julia, a therapist living near the border, is drawn into the humanitarian effort after a distressing encounter, transforming her from bystander to active rescuer.
Jalal Altawil and Dalia Naous, playing Bashir and Amina, deliver visceral portrayals of fractured hope and familial devotion, embodying their scenes with poignant subtlety. Tomasz Wlosok as Janek captures the toll of institutional brutality on conscience, showing a man torn between orders and empathy. Maja Ostaszewska’s Julia is quietly resolute, her growing activism a beacon of moral clarity amid chaos. The activists—Marta, Zuku, and others—felt lived-in rather than theatrical, their commitment grounding the film in real-world truth.
A fierce indictment of geopolitical manipulation, Green Border dramatises how refugees are instrumentalised by authoritarian regimes—Belarusian President Lukashenko weaponised migration to destabilise the EU, and Poland’s response was equally dehumanising. Through its fragmented structure, the film paints migration as both tragedy and theatre, where human beings are shuffled like pawns, and suffering becomes performance. A powerful metaphor recurs: refugees are treated as bullets or footballs, discarded between borders.
Shot in stark black and white and framed with documentary immediacy, Holland’s film feels urgent and raw. Tomasz Naumiuk’s cinematography plunges us into fog, mud, and branch-riddled forests—places where light is scarce and hope scarcer. The fractured narrative, shifting between perspectives, heightens empathy while withholding comfort—a deliberate rejection of cinematic ease.
Though rooted in the Poland-Belarus crisis, the film reverberates globally, capturing our era’s refugee dilemmas and Europe's moral erosion. It stands as urgent cinema, both documentary witness and moral reckoning. In Poland, the film became unexpectedly successful—despite, or perhaps because of, government condemnation, it drew hundreds of thousands of viewers and may have influenced political sentiment during an election season.
Green Border is a fierce, disquieting odyssey through the machinery of empathy-denial. Through its unblinking gaze at the border’s dehumanisation, Holland delivers a call to conscience—cinema that resists forgetting.
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