Green Border
Take a look in advance
In the treacherous forests, the Green Border, between Belarus and Poland, refugees trying to reach Europe via this route must find a way out. Belarus is trying to undermine the EU by encouraging this border crossing, while Poland refuses to admit the refugees. The increasingly resentful and aggressive Polish border forces are not housing these people in camps. They simply throw the refugees back over the barbed wire fence, where they live and die in the wasteland of the forest. This destabilization strategy of Belarus for the "green border" helps Poland become paranoid xenophobic, precisely the geopolitical mood that Lukashenko (and Putin) find sympathetic.
And so the refugees find themselves in a cold...
In the treacherous forests, the Green Border, between Belarus and Poland, refugees trying to reach Europe via this route must find a way out. Belarus is trying to undermine the EU by encouraging this border crossing, while Poland refuses to admit the refugees. The increasingly resentful and aggressive Polish border forces are not housing these people in camps. They simply throw the refugees back over the barbed wire fence, where they live and die in the wasteland of the forest. This destabilization strategy of Belarus for the "green border" helps Poland become paranoid xenophobic, precisely the geopolitical mood that Lukashenko (and Putin) find sympathetic.
And so the refugees end up in a cold, swampy no man's land, without food and medical care, desperate and fearful. There are refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Africa, a Polish border guard with a pregnant wife who has doubts about the brutality he must commit (illegally) and a Polish psychotherapist who is shocked and radicalized by witnessing the death of a refugee child. He then joins young Polish activists who make trips to the forest to offer all the medical help and legal assistance they can.
The result is a somber, poignant film shot in black and white. A testimony to what is happening in Europe right now. At times it seems as if the film is made up of two different genres: a film about the Eastern Front in a war, or perhaps a very different, futuristic film: a post-apocalyptic drama in which the forest is the scene of a frantic struggle for survival experienced by people whose humanity has been almost completely stripped from them, as if by a nuclear blast.
Agnieszka Holland (Warsaw, November 28, 1948) is a Polish film and television director and screenwriter. She began her career as an assistant to directors Krzystof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda. Her films explore political and moral issues within the confines of an oppressive regime. She emigrated to France shortly before the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981. At age 74, Agnieszka Holland has lost none of her passion - or compassion - and she shows it again in this brutal, angry, grueling drama.