Green Border Review | There Is No Shelter Here

Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s incendiary refugee crisis pastiche Green Border is a bracing, emotionally devastating examination of society in moral free fall. One of the most vital and important films of the modern era, Green Border painstakingly illustrates the ways in which impoverished and marginalized peoples looking for a lifeline are often cruelly used as pawns in a larger game played between warring governments with mounting far-right sentiments. In what might be the finest film of her lengthy, noteworthy career, Holland (Europa Europa, In Darkness, 1993’s underrated version of The Secret Garden) never shies away from point blank depictions of trauma and violent cruelty carried out by brainwashed souls, regardless of age or gender identity. Green Border is a brutal film with very few moments of hope, but it also refreshingly refrains from being cynical about a global catastrophe that has been boiling over on the geopolitical back burner for decades now.

Green Border starts in October of 2021 and spans the course of a little over a year in the lives of various people caught up in the global refugee crisis. A family fleeing persecution by ISIS in Syria travels on a flight to Belarus with a wide array of fellow refugees from other countries with hopes of making their way to relatives in Sweden, where they hope to make an asylum claim. The migrants have all been told by the Belarusian propaganda machine that crossing the border into Poland will be easy and they’ll be welcomed with open arms by the EU. Little do these people know that they are being weaponized by the Belarusian and Russian governments in a dispute with the Polish army. Belarus doesn’t want these refugees, and the Polish see them as tools of Vladimir Putin and Aleksandr Lukashenko designed to destabilize Western Europe and take advantage of “Polish kindness.” These refugees are forced out of Belarus and left to their own devices to survive in the freezing cold forests and quicksand-like swamps along the Polish border. If they are caught and discovered by the ultra-zealous Polish border patrols, the refugees are immediately transported back to the exclusionary zone between the two countries and the fruitless and dangerous cycle of migration and survival begins anew.

After initially setting her focus on the Syrian family and an Afghani English teacher (Behi Djanati Atai) who accompanies them, Holland and co-writers Maciej Pisuk and Gabriela Lazarkiewicz expand and shift their view towards the lives of Polish peoples living and working along the border. A young border guard (Tomasz Wlosok), who’s about to welcome his first child into the world with his wife (Malwina Buss), grows increasingly conflicted with the futility and violent nature of his job. A group of activists travel the woods providing aid to the stranded refugees in any way they can, but if these displaced peoples want to claim asylum in Poland or are in need of serious medical treatment, by law the group has to contact border patrol, and everyone knows how pointless that will be. And a therapist (Maja Ostaszewska) who has recently moved to the local area witnesses the atrocities and cruelties happening around her and becomes increasingly involved with helping the refugees and aid workers any way she can.

Politically charged message movies with interlocking, multi-arc storylines can often devolve into preachy moments of soapboxing, but Green Border refrains from such forced cynicism because simply depicting the emotional and depressing truth of the matter at hand is far more effective and intelligent. The most obviously symbolic stylistic touch employed by Holland is the decision to shoot Green Border in black and white, but even that works to the director’s advantage by nicely reflecting the bleak, stark nature of the issues at hand. There’s no sentimentality and very little genuine uplift to be found in Green Border, with Holland depicting Poland as a crumbling place shifting further towards isolationist conservatism at the expense of its own soul and values. It’s a world where everyone on all sides lives on the brink of insanity, and Holland makes it easy to see how toxic beliefs take root and exclusionary tactics are enforced, sometimes with malevolently evil glee. Holland also lays bare the reasons why progressive thinking activists become discouraged, jaded, or revolutionary in the face of measures that make helping refugees virtually impossible. Any victory for the forces of good and kindness to be found in Green Border – no matter how small, pyrrhic, or immediately undone – come across as being monumental in the grand scheme of things.

In Green Border, everything in the world has become unrooted and transactional. Scheming profiteers make promises to refugees they can’t keep or withhold valuable resources like food and water for exorbitant prices that would break even the most well off migrants who have saved cash for such occasions. Migrants look at each other skeptically, possibly fearing that they could be sold out for the comfort of someone else’s journey. Bodes of the living and dead alike are literally tossed over barbed wire fences because neither country wants to deal with the issue at hand or take a modicum of responsibility, and the aid workers trying to make a difference end up coming across like dogs chasing constantly lobbed tennis balls being battered from place to place. Everyday citizens are treated by the border patrol with a great deal of distrust that isn’t close to what the refugees experience, but it creates a world where they too are fleeced by the government just for daring to exist in an area of crisis.

Holland could be accused of laying the depressing touches a little thick, but one could also credibly argue that there’s no other way to tell a story about a situation world leaders have ignored for decades with hopes it will all go away or work itself out. No one comes out and says it, but the world is at war, full stop. It goes beyond the most high profile military conflicts and cold wars currently unfolding in the headlines. It happens increasingly in every country around the world, and often among its own people, who can’t come together and decide upon healthy ways of countering global unease, displacement, and violence. In a world where people often refuse to decide between reaction violently and compassionately, ambivalence and apathy often win the day to the detriment of humanity as a whole. Green Border examines this continuing, insidious shift without once coming across as simplistic or broad in its approach. Every aspect of Holland’s film is granular and laser focused on the people involved. No one is an avatar for a larger issue, although they are all part of bigger systems dealing with problems, roadblocks, and frustrations they can’t solve. Green Border is a plea for acknowledgment that the world is a fucked up place right now, and that change for the better, while not easy, is worth fighting for. Nothing less than the soul of the world is at stake in Green Border, and Holland makes the viewer feel every bit of the struggle.

Green Border opens at TIFF Lightbox in Toronto on Friday, June 28, 2024. It opens at Carbon Arc in Halifax on Friday, July 12, and Sudbury Indie Cinema on August 8.