Green Border review: An exhilarating and empathetic depiction of a humanitarian crisis

Green Border, the latest from master Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, is nothing short of a call to direct action. The film provides a nuanced, if at times frankly brutal, account of the treacherous conditions migrants face on the Polish-Belarusian border, which are either exacerbated or assuaged by opposing military and activist forces.

This particular frontier is dubbed the “green border” due to the thick, swampy forest that separates the two countries. Duped by a fraudulent campaign orchestrated by Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko, migrants from Africa and the Middle East travel to the Eastern European country (and noted Russian ally) after being reassured that they will find swift and safe passage to Poland, thus able to apply for asylum in the European Union. When they do cross over, however, Polish border patrol simply rounds the refugees back up and dumps them over barbed wire back into Belarus, where they are abused, robbed, and berated before being violently pushed back into Poland. The vicious cycle repeats as they become ill, hobbled, disappeared, and, increasingly, killed. (The bureaucratic, Kafkaesque nature of this torture tease hues of Holland’s next project, a biopic simply entitled Franz.)

In order to portray the full breadth of this humanitarian crisis, Holland follows three key entities who converge at the border. First, we meet three generations of a Syrian family and an Afghani English teacher (Behi Djanati Atai) who team up to cross the border together, which at first seems as easy as promised. (“We’re in the European Union! We made it!” they celebrate less than 15 minutes into the film’s runtime.) What they don’t know is that they are still technically in the so-called Polish “exclusion zone,” which is crawling with border patrol who are all too eager to give them the boot back to Belarus. Holland focuses on one such agent named Jan (Tomasz Włosok), a rookie with a wife and first baby on the way. Tasked with reprehensible protocol (such as how to dispose of migrant bodies found on Polish territory), Jan’s character provides insight into the psychology of a “family man” driven to perpetuate inhumane behavior. At the other end of the political spectrum is Julia (Maja Ostaszewska), a previously ambivalent psychologist who is motivated to join an activist group providing aid to refugees after seeing a tragedy unfold in her own backyard.

Holland approaches the material with indignant rage and the irrefutable facts to back it up. Dialogue directly states the mounting migrant death toll in Europe (which is cited as “over 20,000” in the film, which takes place during the peak of this “crisis” in 2021; a post-film addendum appears to correct this total to “over 30,000” at the time of the film’s completion in 2023) and its characters were shaped through hours of pre-production interviews with refugees, activists, Polish borderland residents, and anonymous border patrol officers. Co-written by Holland, Maciej Pisuk, and Gabriela Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko, the bulk of the screenplay was penned in 2021 while the trio closely followed developments on the border.

This is far from the first time the filmmaker has employed stark, if controversial, realism in her work, particularly when addressing crimes against humanity. Perhaps her best-known film, 1991’s Europa Europa, follows Jewish teenager Solomon Perel who fled Germany for Poland and, in fooling Nazi occupying forces, found himself conscripted as a Hitler Youth. In 2011, Holland explored the Holocaust once again with In Darkness, about a Polish sewer worker who would help Jewish refugees by concealing them in the underground tunnels. While these films condemn genocidal acts—and point out Poland’s complicity in World War II—they do not paint characters as simply “evil” or “pure.” In fact, Holland posits that every individual possesses the ability to be cruel or caring, often highlighting that groups who find themselves in positions of power or subjugation are capable of the same scope of human experience and emotion.

Yet this perspective is one that Holland’s country of birth cannot subscribe to. The writer-director has been criticized by Polish politicians in the past, but the official response to Green Border has largely been to brand her as a Nazi. In an irate post on X, Minister of Justice Zbigniew Ziobro wrote: “In the Third Reich, the Germans produced propaganda films showing Poles as bandits and murderers. Today they have Agnieszka Holland for that.” Aside from the laughable notion that a woman of Jewish descent who has dedicated several films to presenting the atrocities of the Holocaust is adopting Nazism by criticizing Poland, these remarks perfectly distill the vital tone of Holland’s artistic viewpoint. By presenting the film in sumptuous black and white (expertly lensed by frequent collaborator Tomasz Naumiuk), Green Border feels timeless in its approach, again emphasizing past and ongoing violence against those deemed societal “threats.” The treatment of African and Middle Eastern refugees, of European Jews, of Palestinian civilians, are all connected by state-sanctioned sadism and those who blindly obey reductive propaganda.

What’s most marvelous about Green Border—aside from its resounding commitment to humanization, buttressed by a thrilling and harrowing narrative—is that it doesn’t let anyone off the hook. Among good-hearted activists, the prioritization of self-preservation inherently means viewing some lives as more important than others. Among migrants, thoughtless desperation leads to devastating loss. Among border guards, “following orders” results in personal ruin. Our mistakes are our own, even if the wider circumstances that lead us to trespass are beyond our control. Even when it appears that as a society we deserve a pat on the back—say, for overwhelming global support for Ukrainian refugees, their immediate acceptance into Poland comprising the film’s final shot—we must ask, “For those whose humanity we have recognized, whose have we ignored?”