Excruciatingly frustrating and heartbreaking, famed Polish director Agnieszka Holland has created a courageously accurate drama based on true events that I am calling The Film of the Decade.
In 2021 Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko, president of Belarus since 1994, let it be known that his country would allow refugees to pass through Belarus on their way west through Poland. When refugees arrived they were indeed accepted at the airport and allowed to engage road transport to Poland, an EU country with a mandate to respect Geneva Convention rules about refugees.
In “Green Border,” a refugee family from Syria and a female Afghan English teacher arrive in Belarus and manage to get ground transportation, pre-paid, to the Polish Border. The problem is that Poland won’t accept them at the normal border stations so the Belarusian military intercepts the ground transports and opens barbed wire marking the border to let them through illegally.
Once in Poland the refugees rejoice to be in what they perceive as a welcoming EU country. However, soon lost in the murky woods they realize their nightmare has just begun.
The drama reaches full pitch when the life of a Polish psychologist, a moralist, becomes intertwined with the fate of the refugees.
Famed director Agnieszka Holland has carefully based all events in the film on true stories. I have also done the research and the crazy is true. Luchenko really has opened his country up for refugee transit, but he has done this in wry retaliation to the EU protest over his re-election. He thinks flooding Poland with Middle Eastern and Afghan refugees will destabilize Poland’s economy as well as infiltrate extremist revolutionary dogma. The refugees are called missiles – a metaphor for what the Poles believe are human armaments intended to destabilize and destroy their country.
Holland includes a humanitarian group in the film that is allowed to administer food and medical support to the refugees in the Polish woods. Here the psychologist joins up with intentions for an even greater intervention.
Holland investigates what choices Polish citizens have made in the wake of the thousands coming across their border. She also shows how differently refugees from Ukraine were treated than those from Muslim countries.
To know is to have the scales lifted from your eyes. The refugee problem is not only on America’s southern border, but a problem all over the world. Using refugees for political chess dehumanizes those already traumatized by the chaos in their own countries. While a US-made barge lists off-shore to transport food into Gaza, I don’t see any organized transport conveying the people in harm’s way out of Gaza to safety in another country.
The cruelty of Lukashenko is a microcosm of the world’s reaction to the Geneva Convention and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights that support “an individual’s right to seek and enjoy asylum from persecution in other countries” (Amnesty International). Written in response to The Holocaust, both documents have proved problematic to the essentially tribal-based countries who were part of the documentation writing in the first place.
Three-time Oscar-nominated Holland has created a magnificently thoughtful film. Holland writes: “My generation of filmmakers felt that we were responsible for representing the problems of the world, and that it was necessary to talk about difficult topics and ask questions—not only existential questions, but ethical, social, and political ones.” She succeeds with “Green Border,” a New York Times Critic’s Pick. It is also one of the most important films of the decade.
Rating: 10/10
Credits
Director: Agnieszka Holland
Writers: Maciej Pisuk, Gabriela Lazarkiewicz, and Agnieszka Holland
Stars: Jalal Altawil, Maja Ostaszewska, Behi Djanati Atai
Music: Frédéric Vercheval
Cinematography: Tomasz Naumiuk
Editing: Pavel Hrdlicka
Runtime: 2 hours 32 minutes
Not Rated
Release: June 21, 2024 US (limited) – Film Forum
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