Green Border review – gripping story of refugees’ fight for survival in the forest – The Guardian
At 74, Polish film-maker Agnieszka Holland has misplaced none of her ardour – or compassion – and this brutal, indignant, gruelling drama, in sombre black and white, is recognisably the work of that director who made Europa Europa in 1990. It’s in regards to the “inexperienced border” exclusion zone between Poland and Belarus, now the placement for an apparently never-ending ordeal for refugees.
With sly malice, Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko has lately permitted the admission of refugees, cynically encouraging their hope of getting simply from there on foot throughout the border into Poland and the EU by way of the Białowieża Forest – however solely as a method of punishing and undermining the European Union for its anti-Belarus sanctions. He has successfully weaponised these determined souls and the more and more resentful and aggressive Polish border power keep away from the bureaucratic necessity of feeding and housing these incomers in camps and simply throw them again over the barbed wire fence, the place they stay and die within the forest wasteland. Belarus’s “inexperienced border” destabilisation technique helps push Poland into paranoid xenophobia, exactly the geopolitical temper which Lukashenko (and Putin) discover congenial.
Holland’s drama covers a mosaic of individuals caught up on this nexus of desperation, starvation, worry and political unhealthy religion: there are refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Africa, a Polish border guard with a pregnant spouse who’s having qualms in regards to the brutality he’s anticipated (illegally) to dish out and a Polish psychotherapist horrified and radicalised by witnessing the dying of a refugee youngster, who then joins what quantities to a guerrilla band of younger Polish activists who make sorties into the forest to offer what medical assist and authorized help they will.
The result’s a sombre, but gripping film in what seems like two separate genres: a film in regards to the jap entrance within the second world struggle, or the primary world struggle, or maybe a wholly totally different, futurist movie: a post-apocalyptic drama through which the forest is the location of some frantic survival-struggle skilled by folks whose humanity has been virtually totally stripped from them, as if by some nuclear blast or germ warfare strike.
When the refugees first stumble euphorically into Poland, believing that their worries are actually over, they nonetheless really feel like human beings. However that is eroded by the pure absurdist horror of being brutally evicted again to Belarus after which thrown again into Poland by two units of troopers, neither of whom need the accountability of coping with them, forwards and backwards – and all below cowl of that forest, whose darkness makes it that bit simpler to get away with uniformed brutality.
When Afghan English instructor Leila (Behi Djanati Atai) stumbles throughout a ploughed subject and pitifully asks a Polish farmer for water, he obliges and even offers her some apples and factors in the direction of a farmhouse the place extra assistance is available. However when she turns and sees him name somebody on his cellular, she panics and runs again to the duvet of woodland whereas he calls after her: “Wait!” Was he actually making an attempt to assist? Or going to denounce her to the authorities? Farmers in occupied Poland or occupied France should have regarded equally ambiguous.
Later, a hatchet-faced Belarusian border guard calls for €50 from Leila for a bottle of water; first refusing to offer her change for a bigger invoice after which petulantly grabbing the water again and contemptuously returning her cash with a slap. Holland exhibits that these degrading petty assaults, together with the very actual bodily violence, chip away at their sense of themselves as human beings. And the Belarusian and Polish guards are themselves afraid of one another.
After which there’s the struggle in Ukraine, and Holland’s movie exhibits that this exact same border power is mobilised to welcome 1000’s of Ukrainian refugees: someway all of the sensible arguments in opposition to refugees seem to have melted away.
Inexperienced Border is a troublesome watch: a punch to the photo voltaic plexus. However an important bearing of cinematic witness to what’s occurring in Europe proper now.
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