Borders Without Doctors: Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border                   

Green Border soars and stumbles because it overreaches in its gravitas and humanity, lingering a little too long and stretching a moment out of shape like all great neorealist films do.

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Agnieszka Holland’s harrowing Green Border, just now arriving to American screens, is one of this year’s most important films. Over the course of two and a half hours, the film works its cinematic and political magic in remarkable ways, cementing Holland as one of Poland’s most formidable filmmakers. Focusing on the refugee crisis in Belarus and Poland through the vantage points of differing actors operating within this theater of cruelty, the film deserves a wide audience. It also deserves a place alongside the masterworks of neorealist cinema.

Situating viewers in the recent past of 2021, we learn early on that the then governments of Poland and Belarus hold little regard for the migrants at their forested borders. Haven and hell, Exclusion Zone and refugee camp, the Białowieża Forest is much more than the imaginary line referenced in Holland’s title. The film’s four chapters – zeroing in on a Syrian family bound for Sweden and an Afghani migrant seeking asylum in Poland, a border guard, activists providing aid, and a woman pulled into the activists’ humanitarian labors – center the view of things from the Polish side of the border. Holland and co-screenwriters Maciej Pisuk and Gabriela Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko dedicate enough story time to each chapter that when their parallel lines start criss-crossing, viewers are prepared for the twists and turns that follow.

This is the kind of material prone to overplaying by actors. Jalal Altawil and Dalia Naous avoid that trap and are stellar in rendering the empty exhaustions of father Bashir and mother Amina throughout. Likewise Monika Frajczyk’s turn as Marta is a pitch-perfect portrait of the activist as frazzled and unfazed by the double binds she operates within. Maja Ostaszewska’s performance as Julia captures her idealism in all its naïve, heartfelt, and infuriating contours that viewers will find themselves rooting for and ruing her in equal measure. The anger and daring of Zuku, Marta’s sister and fellow activist, come off as too easy until you realize Jasmina Polak is operating this adolescently cavalier machine to full effect.

Filmmakers and their cinematographers often turn to black and white for documentary draping or modernist minimalisms. Holland and cinematographer Tomasz Naumiuk wager that a story as brutal as this necessitates a world without color. Their bet pays off. The minute our first protagonists are forced out of the minivan that picked them up at the airport into the forest’s expanse, a palpable dread saturates the screen. Who needs the distracting details of green foliage and red blood?

Where Green Border falters is in its heavier scenes, asking viewers to bear witness to declarations of defiance and acts of cruelty that veer into melodramatic moralizing. Holland certainly knows the point she is making in showing her protagonists getting corralled into military vehicles and ordered across the border again and again by Belarusian and Polish guards patrolling it with sadistic resolve. As Pauline Kael observed in her review of Emile de Antonio’s 1969 antiwar treatise In the Year of the Pig, “After one watches the movie for a while, the Americans in it begin to look monstrously callow, like clumsy, oversized puppets.”1 And when Leila, played by the great Behi Djanati Atai, cries out “Why are you doing this to us?” what was intended as pathos rings hollow. The drama of the moment is convincing enough without this one line of dialogue distractingly undermining it.

The racialized hypocrisies of Poland’s and Europe’s treatment of migrants is another target of the script by Holland, Pisuk, and Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko, underscored in a key scene where Zuku lacerates the European Union and an epilogue that connects the dots to current events. Yet when a Polish family takes in a trio of young Africans, our screenwriters cannot resist rerouting Green Border down a path with White saviorist dead ends. Shots of our protagonists reveling in their hotellike accommodations and enjoying an impromptu rap by the family’s teenage son come across as cutesy and contrived. Only a magically realist detour lasting less than a minute saves the film here. In this lies one of the film’s core lessons. Green Border soars and stumbles because it overreaches in its gravitas and humanity, lingering a little too long and stretching a moment out of shape like all great neorealist films do.

Neorealism is an empathic sympathy or sympathetic empathy machine, depending on where one places the stress. From Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City to Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D., Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Vidas Secas to Haile Gerima’s Harvest: 3,000 Years and beyond, neorealist cinema tunnels into audiences’ attachments and indignations. Here I have in mind what Kath Weston has identified in a different context as the workings of “sympathetic indignation, born of sympathy for another’s distress, knowing what one feels for one’s own.”2 Like its neorealist predecessors the film understands that looking at the inhumane, in embedded medium shots and impossible close-ups, is a powerful act. I will be haunted by the images of calloused feet Naumiuk lingers on with verité detail for a long time. And the film’s attention to the details of aid work – backpacks stuffed with water, medicines, soup, and clothes alongside paperwork to be perpetually signed and translations to provide – is incredible. How rarely is humanitarian action, under the sign of social justice, ever given screentime in a fiction film. In humanizing the headlines and pulling on viewers’ heartstrings, Holland unapologetically updates neorealism for the present. That Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station and Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland are the closest American cinema has come in recent years to what Holland and her associates accomplish here is a scandal for another essay.

Good films work their magic on you and disappear. Great films haunt you for days afterward. When the person seated near me called out a quiet “No,” speaking directly to the screen in hushed address during a nerve-wracking scene, I knew I was watching a good film. When I found myself walking around in a subdued daze the day after I saw Green Border, pondering the multitiered backstories of those sharing the sidewalks of the global city with me, I knew I had seen a great film.

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All images are screenshots from the film.