‘Green Border’ gives voice to refugee experience in Poland

[Nat Quinn]

Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s award-winning “Green Border,” opening Friday at the Coolidge Corner Theater, offers a broad, eye-opening view of the immigrant crisis as it erupted on Poland’s border with Belarus, an ally of Russia.

The two-time Oscar nominated filmmaker uses black and white to consider the various elements that interact for refugees — with life and death consequences in the so-called exclusion zone where these supplicants are pawns.

Holland divides the film into chapters, beginning with “October 2021 Europe” and begins on a plane. We follow a determined single Afghan woman making the journey alone, a generation-spanning Syrian family with a grandfather and three children. Later we see a border guard sickened by the brutality and death that he’s part of as his pregnant wife waits to give birth. And there’s a local Polish woman driven to activism to assist these hapless refugees from the Middle East and Africa. She is arrested, stripped naked, photographed as a criminal for her efforts.

“I decided to make the film months after the crisis of the Polish borders started,” Holland, 75, began in a phone interview in English. “And it became clear to me where it’s going. At the same time, the Polish government decided to lock the zone around the border and not allow access to the media – and also to the non-governmental organizations, medical organizations and activists.

“So it was practically impossible to honestly document what was going on with a documentary film. I started to think it is the moment to make fiction, which is like reality and shows something that is going on.

“But we are recreating the situations and trying to give the fullness to the people who are the part of that situation, to give them voices and faces and the space that we can understand what kind of the choices they are facing. Or when they don’t have any choice.”

Because “Green Border” is an independent production, Holland said there were no barriers to having it be black and white.

It was a choice because, she said, “I wanted the association with a documentary — and also with the history. With the films from the Second World War.

“In that situation on the border, it became very relevant for many people. They were telling me, ‘Oh, it is like during the Holocaust’ or ‘It was exactly what my grandmother told me about.’

“And also, some of the imagery was coming back. And some habits of the uniform. A man will be like a nice fellow until now and suddenly they are screaming and, yes, throwing the child over the razor wire fence. So yes, I wanted at the same time the documentary rawness and the metaphorical.”

 

source:https://www.bostonherald.com/2024/07/21/green-border-gives-voice-to-refugee-experience-in-poland/

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