152 min | NR | June 21, 2024 | Kino Lorber
A Syrian family flies to Belarus expecting an open door into Europe. Instead two governments trap them in a freezing forest and use them as ammunition. Agnieszka Holland shoots the whole thing in black and white and dares you to call it exaggeration.
A Syrian family boards a flight to Minsk believing it has bought a safe route into Europe. The father Bashir, the grandfather, and the children land in Belarus, and the regime there herds them to the border as a weapon against the European Union. Polish guards shove them back across the wire into the swamp. Green Border is about the strip of forest where two governments trap people and pass them back and forth like cargo. The border here is not a line on a map. It is a machine that manufactures cruelty and recruits ordinary people to run it.
Jalal Altawil plays Bashir as a father who keeps his composure long after composure stops helping. He carries his family on the belief that reason still works, and the film strips that belief away hour by hour. Behi Djanati Atai plays Leila with a hardness that barely covers her exhaustion and grief. Mohamad Al Rashi plays the grandfather as a body the system wears down to nothing. Tomasz Włosok plays Jan, a young Polish border guard, as a man who follows orders and slowly registers what those orders are doing to him. Maja Ostaszewska plays Julia, an activist who walks away from a comfortable life to drag water and food into the forest.
Agnieszka Holland directs from a script she wrote with Gabriela Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko and Maciej Pisuk. The script splits the film into chapters that hand the story from the refugees to the guard to the activists. Each shift forces the viewer to watch the same border from a new angle. Holland shoots in black and white, which drains the forest of any postcard beauty and flattens the mud, the barbed wire, and the faces into the same cold gray. The handheld camera stays low in the brush and refuses the wide establishing shots that would let anyone feel safe. The restraint extends to the soundtrack, which Holland keeps nearly silent so that breathing and cold water do the work a score would normally do.
Green Border knows exactly what it wants the viewer to feel and never pretends to be neutral. Holland made it in fury, and the fury reads in every push-back and every cry for help. It would be easy to call this propaganda. That label mistakes clarity for distortion. Holland points the camera at a policy that European governments would rather keep in the dark, and she does not let anyone look away. The result is hard to sit through and harder to forget.