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

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

This profoundly moving, flawlessly executed multi-strand drama, shot in stark black and white, tracks refugees from various nations in 2021 trying to cross the border from Belarus into Poland. With inevitably tragic consequences, they become pawns in a gruesome game of “pass the parcel” between guards on both sides of the title’s green border, the dividing line between European Union member Poland and Russia ally Belarus.

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Although the violence shown isn’t gratuitous, the suffering in Green Border (Zielona granica) is painfully palpable. There is a moment where a Pole, a minor character in the story, refuses to look at a video on a friend’s phone showing a border guard beating a migrant; Holland’s film implicitly confronts everyone — and that would be most of us — who has ever switched off or turned away from watching yet another deplorable act of state-sponsored violence.

On the news and in cinema, there has been no shortage of footage and re-enactments of the agonies suffered every day by migrants and refugees. But Holland cunningly digs a little deeper here to explore the psyches of characters who might just be faceless heavies in other stories — like the Polish border guards, shown encouraged by an officer giving a “morale” talk to think of migrants as weapons sent across the border by Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Not long after the section featuring these soldiers and their community, the frame pulls back further to encompass some of their compatriots who are trying to help the refugees. Some of these volunteers are doctors or lawyers, but others are activists opposed to the right-wing regime of President Andrzej Duda — people putting their own safety at risk but also sometimes fracturing the resistance with infighting over strategies. Altogether, these braided strands make for a bracing, impassioned skein of humanist cinema, old-school in technique but right up to the moment in terms of its subject matter.

The action starts about a year before the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, when migrants from war-torn countries like Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were encouraged by Lukashenko to use Belarus as a gateway to Poland and the EU. But the people we meet traveling on a Turkish plane in the film’s first scene have no idea this was a cruel trick, designed by Belarus to make their EU-member neighbors look like the bad guys when they refuse to extend asylum to the refugees and send them back over the border.

Aboard the plane, a Syrian family of six from Harasta have managed to survive the civil war at home and hope to pass through Belarus and Poland en route to Sweden. Bashir (Jalal Altawil, a Syrian refugee himself) literally has scars on his back from a run-in with ISIS. Accompanying Bashir are his father (Mohamad Al Rashi), Bashir’s wife Amina (Dalia Naous), pre-adolescent son Nur (Taim Ajjan), his younger sister Ghalia (Talia Ajjan) and a toddler who is still breastfeeding. The family try to strike up a conversation with a woman sitting next to them, Leila (Behi Djanati Atai), only to realize that she speaks no Arabic, only English and her native tongue. Later, we learn that Leila is from Afghanistan and wants to seek asylum in Poland.

When they get to Belarus, the Syrian family offer to let Leila ride with them to Poland in a taxi that’s already been paid for by Bashir’s brother (Noah Meskina) in Sweden. But the driver rips them off for more money, which Leila pays, and they must make the difficult crossing illegally in the night, frightened by the sound of shooting in the distance.

When they’re captured by the Polish border guards, Leila and the Syrians are herded together with terrified refugees from other countries and shipped back to Belarus, just the beginning of an increasingly brutal ordeal that sees them crossing the border several times. All are beaten by guards on both sides. Others in the party die by drowning in the marshes, or from exposure, shock, dehydration or starvation. In one of the film’s most shocking scenes — one with many correlations in current events — a pregnant African woman is literally thrown over the border, causing what looks like a miscarriage.

When the focus shifts to the Polish characters, at first it is almost a relief until we see how much this infernal situation has warped and traumatized them too. Of the guards, the one we get to know best is Jan (Tomasz Wlosok), who is expecting a baby with his wife (Malwina Buss, who is actually married to Wlosok in real life). Although Jan is tenderly concerned about his own wife and unborn child, somehow he struggles to extend that empathy to the pregnant refugees he meets in this course of work.

Psychiatrist Julia (Maja Ostaszewska), on the other hand, makes her living through empathy, filling the silence in her life with care for patients, especially in the wake of her husband’s recent death. After she helps two refugees we’ve met earlier in the film who get stuck in a swamp near her house, she is so appalled by how the state treats them that she joins up with a grassroots activist cell dedicated to bringing healthcare and advice to those caught in the no man’s land-like exclusion zone near the border.

All of the above just scratches the surface of the teeming plot, credited to Maciej Pisuk, Gabriela Lazarkiewicz-Sieczko and Holland. The latter also shares her directing credit with Kamila Tarabura and Katarzyna Warzecha, and it’s not hard to see how this panoramic drama would need extra directors to marshal all the strands and storylines. And yet it never feels bitty or fragmented as the drama pulls everything together by the end with a coda set just after war between Ukraine and Russia begins in 2022.

Amid all the justified sympathy for Ukrainians displaced by that conflict, there were a few quiet voices speaking up back then noting that the refugee crisis a year before — one involving people who didn’t look as much like Poles and other EU citizens — didn’t get anywhere near the same exposure. Green Border is one cinematic step toward rectifying that imbalance while acknowledging that, all over the world, thousands of people have died while trying to escape poverty and conflict.

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