Green Border

Director: Agnieszka Holland (Poland, USA, France, Czech Republic, Belgium, Germany, Turkey). Year of Release: 2023

2021, the skies above Belarus. A green forest makes way to the monochrome inside of an aeroplane. The camera focusses in on a Syrian family from Harasta. Bashir and Amina have 3 children, one of each – a boy Nur, a girl Ghania, and Mahir, a suckling baby. They are accompanied by Amina’s father. Another passenger is Leila, from Afghanistan, who the Syrian family meets when Nur tries to change seats with her so he can look out of the window.

As the passengers leave the plane, they are presented with roses by the always gracious airline staff. This is the last act of kindness they will experience for quite some time. The Syrian family makes its way to a taxi, paid for by Bashir’s brother in Malmö. It should take them to the Polish border, with easy transit through Poland and towards Sweden. Leila, who is on her own, bums a lift with them, though she wants to stay in Poland, where her brother has connections.

As the taxi approaches the border, it is stopped by an armed militia. The driver demands an extra $300 if he is to drive any further. After Leila gives him €300, the passengers are bundled out of the car, pushed under the barbed wire on the border, and told to run as quickly as they can. This pushes them into the arms of Polish security guards, who show just as much hostility towards the scared refugees as their Belarusian counterparts.

Leila moves towards a nearby road and addresses a local farmer. At first, he is friendly, offering her water and apples. But when she turns to return to the others, he takes his phone and starts to make a call. This does not necessarily mean that he is about to report Leila and her friends to the police, but there is enough uncertainty to invoke a panic in her. She runs away as quickly as she can, while the farmer implores her to stop.

The refugees are a helpless ping poll ball, batted with great force between Polish and Belarusian governments and border guards, who seem to lack the most basic elements of empathy. Whichever side of the border they are, they are viciously attacked with batons and slavering dogs. At one stage, a very pregnant African woman is pushed over the barbed wire border fence, so that the guilt for the miscarriage which this probably induces is transferred to the “other” side.

Some scenes are particularly heart-rending. Hearing the sound of hungry and thirsty babies, Leila begs the guards to give them something to drink. A brutal guard offers her a bottle of water … for €50. As Leila looks in her purse for the money, he snatches it away from her, and takes all the money he can find. Then he lifts the bottle and pours the water onto the dry ground, leaving with her with a few drops for the thirsty kids.

We skip to the POV of Jan, a security guard, who attends a meeting with other guards. A sergeant bellows out propaganda about how the helpless refugees are paedophiles and zoophiles. Jan is distracted from his work by texts from his wife Kasia, who is heavily pregnant, and looks like she might offer a maternal counterweight to her husband’s brutality. Then we see her in the supermarket, berating a shopper for criticising the border régime and her hard-working husband.

Jan’s qualms at the job he has to do are never entirely convincing. You have the feeling that he is more at home within the brutalising and brutalised border guards that the film would like to accept. Yes, maybe an individual security guard may question his dehumanizing job, but I don’t share the film’s apparent optimism that anyone like this would not be crushed out of them. But this is not just Jan’s story, and soon we move onto much less ambiguous people.

Marta and Zuku are sisters. They are part of a group of activists in the wood, who are trying to provide fleeing refugees with basic necessities like water, food, bandages, and powerbanks to charge their mobile phones. Marta is nominally in charge, but you sense that Zuku has a frustrated mind of her own. They work with a doctor who is empowered to recommend that the seriously ill should be taken to a hospital, but cannot prevent border patrols returning the injured to Belarus.

The focus shifts once more to Julia, a psychiatrist who lives nearby where she conducts most of her appointments with desperate clients online. We eavesdrop on one of Julia’s patient who – with some justification – attributes his ailments to a viciously indifferent and racist government. When Julia witnesses a child drown in the swamp outside her house, she offers whatever support she can provide to the activists who are trying to prevent the worst of this from happening.

Marta tells Julia what she can do, and what is just not possible. Any attempt to directly intervene will result in government intervention and the NGO which tries to helps the activists losing all of its funding. Julia acknowledges these limitations, without necessarily accepting them. She calls a liberal friend and asks to borrow her SUV. When Julia shows a video of a refugee being brutalised, her friend looks away and withdraws the offer of her car to help any potentially illegal operations.

Some reviews over-emphasize the clear criticism of Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko and his backer in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin. But while Green Border makes clear that both men are barbarian killers, it does not attempt to portray the Polish or Western governments as being any better. Polish border guards are just as heartless as their Belarusian counterparts, and they have the added sense of justification that they are implementing EU policy.

Green Border clearly names the right wing Belarusian and Polish governments as being responsible for the misery inflicted on refugees, but it also apportions blame to the EU, most clearly through the cynical Zuku, who has had enough of pretending that all Poland needs is a little more help from its Western allies. It is not even that the EU is indifferent to the plight of refugees, but through Frontex and Fortress Europe, it is responsible for 20,000 deaths in the Mediterranean alone.

End credits note that Poland accepted 300,000 Ukrainian refugees in the year after Green Border is set. One reviewer sees this endnote as a “brief note of unusual compassion”. Talk about missing the point. While of course we should welcome the fact that – under international pressure – the Polish government welcome blue eyed, blond refugees from Ukraine, but it should be equally clear why similar pressure was not exerted for it to take in people from darker-skinned countries.

A Polish friend has the minor complaint that the film does not pay sufficient regard to the Białowieża Forest, in which it is set. She says: “it wasn’t made clear how special and important the forest is, I don’t think Bialowieza was even named once. It’s the last primary forest in Europe and there are areas (not because of the state of emergency but because of nature protection) that are normally inaccessible. The forest is also beautiful and I don’t think that came across so much.”

This is a valid criticism, but as my friend herself says “I understand there are limits to what one film can do.” Green Border lasts a relentless 2 ½ hours, and no minute feels wasted. But for the film to go any longer, it would start to severely try our patience. So let’s forgive its inability to cover every last detail. There is much more here than should be expected from a simple film. Watching Green Border is an arduous and exhausting experience, and worth each of its 150 minutes.