‘Green Border’ Review: Agnieszka Holland’s Knockout Drama Follows Refugees Stuck in Limbo – Hollywood Reporter

If cinema is an empathy machine, to paraphrase the late Roger Ebert, then Agnieszka Holland’s new movie is one precision-tooled specimen.

This profoundly shifting, flawlessly executed multi-strand drama, shot in stark black and white, tracks refugees from numerous nations in 2021 making an attempt to cross the border from Belarus into Poland. With inevitably tragic penalties, they develop into pawns in a ugly sport of “move the parcel” between guards on either side of the title’s inexperienced border, the dividing line between European Union member Poland and Russia ally Belarus.

Though the violence proven isn’t gratuitous, the struggling in Inexperienced Border (Zielona granica) is painfully palpable. There’s a second the place a Pole, a minor character within the story, refuses to have a look at a video on a buddy’s cellphone displaying a border guard beating a migrant; Holland’s movie implicitly confronts everybody — and that will be most of us — who has ever switched off or turned away from watching one more deplorable act of state-sponsored violence.

On the information and in cinema, there was no scarcity of footage and re-enactments of the agonies suffered every single day by migrants and refugees. However Holland cunningly digs a little bit deeper right here to discover the psyches of characters who would possibly simply be faceless heavies in different tales — just like the Polish border guards, proven inspired by an officer giving a “morale” discuss to think about migrants as weapons despatched throughout the border by Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Not lengthy after the part that includes these troopers and their neighborhood, the body pulls again additional to embody a few of their compatriots who’re making an attempt to assist the refugees. A few of these volunteers are docs or attorneys, however others are activists against the right-wing regime of President Andrzej Duda — individuals placing their very own security in danger but additionally typically fracturing the resistance with infighting over methods. Altogether, these braided strands make for a bracing, impassioned skein of humanist cinema, old-school in method however proper up-to-the-minute by way of its material.

The motion begins a few yr earlier than the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, when migrants from war-torn international locations like Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been inspired by Lukashenko to make use of Belarus as a gateway to Poland and the EU. However the individuals we meet touring on a Turkish aircraft within the movie’s first scene don’t know this was a merciless trick, designed by Belarus to make their EU-member neighbors seem like the unhealthy guys once they refuse to increase asylum to the refugees and ship them again over the border.

Aboard the aircraft, a Syrian household of six from Harasta have managed to outlive the civil battle at residence and hope to move by means of Belarus and Poland en path to Sweden. Bashir (Jalal Altawil, a Syrian refugee himself) actually has scars on his again from a run-in with ISIS. Accompanying Bashir are his father (Mohamad Al Rashi), Bashir’s spouse Amina (Dalia Naous), pre-adolescent son Nur (Taim Ajjan), his youthful sister Ghalia (Talia Ajjan) and a toddler who continues to be breastfeeding. The household attempt to strike up a dialog with a girl sitting subsequent to them, Leila (Behi Djanati Atai), solely to appreciate that she speaks no Arabic, solely English and her native tongue. Later, we study that Leila is from Afghanistan and desires to hunt asylum in Poland.

Once they get to Belarus, the Syrian household provide to let Leila journey with them to Poland in a taxi that’s already been paid for by Bashir’s brother (Noah Meskina) in Sweden. However the driver rips them off for extra money, which Leila pays, and so they should make the troublesome crossing illegally within the night time, frightened by the sound of capturing within the distance.

Once they’re captured by the Polish border guards, Leila and the Syrians are herded along with terrified refugees from different international locations and shipped again to Belarus, only the start of an more and more brutal ordeal that sees them crossing the border a number of instances. All are crushed by guards on either side. Others within the occasion die by drowning within the marshes, or from publicity, shock, dehydration or hunger. In one of many movie’s most surprising scenes — one with many correlations in present occasions — a pregnant African lady is actually thrown over the border, inflicting what seems like a miscarriage.

When the main focus shifts to the Polish characters, at first it’s nearly a aid till we see how a lot this infernal state of affairs has warped and traumatized them too. Of the guards, the one we get to know greatest is Jan (Tomasz Wlosok), who’s anticipating a child together with his spouse (Malwina Buss, who is definitely married to Wlosok in actual life). Though Jan is tenderly involved about his personal spouse and unborn youngster, one way or the other he struggles to increase that empathy to the pregnant refugees he meets on this course of labor.

Psychiatrist Julia (Maja Ostaszewska), alternatively, makes her residing by means of empathy, filling the silence in her life with look after sufferers, particularly within the wake of her husband’s current loss of life. After she helps two refugees we’ve met earlier within the movie who get caught in a swamp close to her home, she is so appalled by how the state treats them that she joins up with a grassroots activist cell devoted to bringing healthcare and recommendation to these caught within the no man’s land-like exclusion zone close to the border.

The entire above simply scratches the floor of the teeming plot, credited to Maciej Pisuk, Gabriela Lazarkiewicz-Sieczko and Holland. The latter additionally shares her directing credit score with Kamila Tarabura and Katarzyna Warzecha, and it’s not laborious to see how this panoramic drama would want further administrators to marshal all of the strands and storylines. And but it by no means feels bitty or fragmented because the drama pulls every thing collectively by the tip with a coda set simply after battle between Ukraine and Russia begins in 2022.

Amid all of the justified sympathy for Ukrainians displaced by that battle, there have been a couple of quiet voices talking up again then noting that the refugee disaster a yr earlier than — one involving individuals who didn’t look as very like Poles and different EU residents — didn’t get wherever close to the identical publicity. Inexperienced Border is one cinematic step towards rectifying that imbalance whereas acknowledging that, all around the world, 1000’s of individuals have died whereas making an attempt to flee poverty and battle.