Green Border

I spent yesterday evening watching Agnieszka Holland’s remarkable film “Green Border” which has just been released to streaming in the UK after spending about 30 seconds in cinemas. The episode that provides the film’s context is the 2021 decision of Alexander Lukashenko, dictator of Belarus and Putin’s puppet, to make use of refugees as a weapon against “the West” by opening up a route for them from Turkey and then shipping them to the border with Poland and, hence, the European Union, where they might hope to claim asylum. The refugees themselves are blameless in all this, and we first see the main family on the flight, Syrians, full of optimism and hoping, that unlike in Turkey they will be able to get their children into school. But what happens is that they are driven to the border by the Belarussians and pushed over into inhospitable forest in winter and then, when discovered by the Poles, brutally pushed back across, through and sometimes over the razor wire that marks the frontier. Stranded in this zone, more and more of them succumb to cold, hunger, injury and disease.

The focus of the film is distributed among various characters: a Polish border guard and his heavily pregnant partner (which mirrors the condition of several refugees); a Polish psychologist and widow to Covid, who lives near the border and responds to cries she hears late at night; the Syrian family and the English-speaking Afghan woman who attaches herself to them and whose brother worked with Polish forces in Afghanistan; and the activists, riven by disagreements.

The film is, in many ways, a horrible and distressing watch as we see human beings reduced to bare existence in a lawless zone and the brutal racism of the Polish border guards executing the instructions of their PiS masters and psyched up against them by claims that the refugees (who include victims of ISIS) are agents of terrorism, paedophilia, even zoophilia. As the state shows a complete disregard for the legal rights of the refugees, the more “liberal” activists stay fixated on medical assistance and getting the legal formalities completed while the anarchists (who are depicted as really quite annoying in their personal conduct) are willing to take the personal risks necessary to actually save people. The Poles in the movie exist on a continuum from the brutally racist, through the Civic Forum voter who looks the other way, through the conflicted liberals to the anarchists, and the tension among the activists is worked through via two antagonistic sisters. At the end of the film Holland focuses on our shared humanity via the nakedness of a conflicted border guard on the one hand and the common musical enthusiasms of Polish teenagers and the Francophone African youth they are sheltering.

I think I’ve avoided too many spoilers there. It is definitely a film that you’ll have to force yourself to watch but it is worth doing so. The film created a scandal in Poland and was denounced by the PiS, then in government. But there’s nothing especially Polish about the circumstance it depicts, illegal pushbacks causing refugee deaths are everywhere: you could make a similar film about Croatia or Greece for example, and the conflict between activists and border guards is one that plays out on the US-Mexico border too. By now I’ve watched quite a few “refugee films” and for the most part they are stories of heroic struggle by the refugees against the those seeking to keep them out. Green Border is different in that it is not a tale of heroism and depicts the moral complexity of most of the people it deals with whilst showing them in their humanity and vulnerability. It is a film that ought to make you angry and what states and their borders do to people.