Green Border

11 June 2024

Director: Agnieszka Holland

See

Black and white and beautifully shot but devestatingly told, ‘Zielona Granica’ in Polish is the story of the late 2022 wave of refugees from the Middle East, mainly Syria and Afghanistan who tried to seek asylum in Poland by crossing the forest border from Belarus. Told through multiple perspectives: The refugees; Bashir (Jalal Altawil), and Leila (Behi Djanati Atai). Border guards; Jan (Tomasz Wlosok). Activists; Zoku (Jasmina Polak), and an everywoman Julia (Maja Ostaszewska) who gets caught up in it and can’t look away or stand by and do nothing.

Think

I remember listening to reports of refugees crossing from Belarus into Poland, and Poles near Bialystok leaving coloured lights in windows for refugees that made it through that they would know they can knock on their door and ask for help. But also discussions similar to the nuance with which these stories are portrayed in this film. Was it a destabilisation operation by Aleksandr Lukashenko as Vladmir Putin’s puppet? ‘How could parents put their children in such peril’. When the building is on fire behind you, you jump and hope for a soft landing. We didn’t give them one.

Feel

Agnieszka Holland is one of the greatest living Polish directors. Each year that there’s a film by her I buy tickets, knowing it’ll be worthwhile. Spoiler alert but the epilogue is poignant reverberation of what comes next, when in February 2023, the border being crossed is by Ukrainian refugees, fleeing the war with Russia, crossing from Lviv to Rzeszow in Poland.

A Polish border guard picks up a Ukrainian child and says sympathetically 

‘Here, go to aunty’ and passes the child to an activist organising bus rides to Warsaw.

 ‘It’s a pity, you couldn’t be so sympathetic when we were on the Belarus border’ She says.

‘I wasn’t there,’ he lies.