The fury that radiates off Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” is so intense that you can almost feel it encasing you in its heat. A brutal, deeply affecting drama set against the migrant crisis in Europe, it is the latest from this great Polish director, a filmmaker whose eclectic résumé includes several films about the Holocaust, a romance starring the young Leonardo DiCaprio as Arthur Rimbaud and episodes of the HBO series “The Wire” and “Treme.” One of the pleasures of Holland’s work is that you never know exactly what to expect; all that is certain is that it will always be worth watching and that, for her, art is a moral imperative.
A fiction firmly rooted in fact, “Green Border” dramatizes the crisis through different players — migrants, guards and activists — converged in and around the border of Poland and Belarus. There, in the so-called exclusion zone, an area that’s off-limits to most, migrants largely from the Middle East and from Africa try to enter the European Union via Poland. In this haunted, contested, dangerously swampy slice of land, men, women and children, families and friends, struggle to traverse national boundaries while evading and at times enduring violence from armed patrols.
Divided into numbered sections, the movie opens on a crowded plane (it seems to be from Turkey) where the discreet, hovering camera pans across different passengers, their faces masked and unmasked, anxious and introspective. The camera soon settles on a tense Syrian husband and wife, Bashir and Amina (Jalal Altawil and Dalia Naous), who are traveling with his father (Mohamad Al Rashi as Grandpa) and the couple’s three children. When their eldest, a sweet preadolescent boy named Nur (Taim Ajjan), asks the woman seated between him and the window if they can trade places so he can take in the view, this small circle opens. Enter Leila (Behi Djanati Atai), a middle-aged Afghan gutsily making the journey alone.
It’s crucial to Holland’s convictions, I think, that the first plane passengers you see aren’t actually members of this little group. Holland doesn’t go in for overexplanation in her movies. Rather, during this one’s brief, minimalist title sequence — it opens with an inviting aerial view of a lushly green forest that soon turns black and white as “Green Border” materializes onscreen — the words “October 2021 Europe” appear, followed by “1. The Family.” (The black-and-white palette remains, which fits this Manichaean world even as it points to the past.) As the movie then cuts from one passenger to the next, from young to old and from adult to child, it soon seems evident that, for Holland, the freighted word family isn’t limited to a chosen few.
Holland sets a brisk pace in “Green Border” that begins rapidly accelerating once the plane touches down. After it lands — the flight attendants hand out roses to the passengers, welcoming them to Belarus — Bashir’s family piles into a van that his brother in Sweden has hired. The family plans to join him; for her part, Leila, who hops in too, is hoping to stay in Poland. All the travel plans have been arranged in advance; routes have been charted, drivers hired, bags packed, cash spent. A great deal more money will pass from hand to hand by the end of “Green Border,” a movie in which each life carries a steep price tag.
Less than 10 minutes after the movie has opened, the van has reached the border and everything begins going catastrophically wrong. In a blur, the driver and an armed Belarusian patrol hustle the family and Leila out of the van and — as gunfire rings out eerily close by — through an opening in a towering razor-wire fence. Amid a cacophony of gunshots and angry shouting (“go, go, go”), the now-panicked migrants scramble into Poland. They resume their journey on foot, walking and sleeping in the woods, but are soon picked up by a Polish patrol that forces them back through the razor-wire fence and into Belarus. There, they are herded into a squalid, heavily guarded camp filled with other migrants.
These desperate souls are pawns swept up in a conflict that European Union officials have called a “hybrid war” between Belarus, an ally of Russia, and Poland, an E.U. member. Holland, who shares screenplay credit with Maciej Pisuk and Gabriela Lazarkiewicz-Sieczko, doesn’t go into detail about the conflict, its stakes and history. Instead, as other chapters open and characters enter, the geopolitical context emerges in naturalistic dialogue and some angry outbursts. When, in the second chapter, a Polish border guard, Jan (Tomasz Wlosok), receives his orders, it’s from an officer who says migrants “aren’t people, they are weapons of Putin and Lukashenko,” Belarus’s president.
As the story unfolds, Holland brings in other characters, including a sympathetic therapist, Julia (Maja Ostaszewska), who’s soon swept up in the crisis, and the movie takes on the pulse of a thriller. More men and women come and go, including some young activists boiling with rage and righteousness, even as Holland keeps circling back to Bashir and Leila, whose cruel ordeal — with its guards, woods and barking dogs — directly echoes the terrors of World War II. That cruelty can be shocking, and while there are moments in this tough movie when I wept, the rigor of Holland’s filmmaking, and the steadfastness of her compassion, help steady you as a viewer. Pay attention, you can almost hear her whispering in your ear. Pay witness.
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