Green Border
Directed by Agnieszka Holland
Agnieszka Holland’s new film is a tough watch: a two-and-a-half hour dissection of the inhumanities encountered by Syrian refugees at Poland’s border with Belarus. We see their plight not just through their own eyes, but also from the perspective of a border guard, struggling with his conscience, and from the viewpoint of humanitarian activists who are determined to outwit the Polish government’s harsh stance on migrants. They see these refugees as pawns in a broader geopolitical game being played by Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus. The final coda, of Ukrainian refugees fleeing across the Polish border just a year after the events depicted, and being welcomed by some of the same activists and border guards, calls out the racism that motivated the Polish government’s actions.
Watching this film moved me in a way that very few films can. It brings weighty issues into a realm that we associate with ‘entertainment’ and, in the process, raises questions not just about issues such as migration and racism, but also about the status of art in our age.
The US film critic Robert Ebert wrote that ‘the movies are like a machine that generates empathy’. A great movie, he said, ‘lets you understand a little bit more about what it’s like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, a different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams, and fears’. We are confronted daily by the struggles of migrants via newspapers and news websites, but seeing their stories dramatised in such a vivid manner helps us identify with their plight. Green Border is akin to Quaker ministry, asking viewers to reflect and respond.
‘Green Border is akin to Quaker ministry.’
For most of human existence, art told us deep existential truths. Paint was too expensive, and an artist’s time too valuable, for it to be wasted on frivolities. This attitude started to shift in the Early Modern Period (around the time Quakerism emerged, coincidentally) with artworks being seen as commodities with decorative and entertainment functions rather than as bearers of deep spiritual truth. To encounter a film (or any other creative endeavour) that still has this power is rare, but it leaves you with a sense of what it must have been like to have experienced the depictions of hell in paintings by Hieronymus Bosch or Rogier van der Weyden. You may have been aware of the concepts, but to see them brought so vividly to life would have shaken you to the core.
A final word of advice: after you have seen this film, give yourself time to process it. See it with a friend – it will be easier to digest if you have someone to talk with. If you want to be entertained, there will be other options at the multiplex. If you want to be reminded what great art is supposed to do, then Green Border is essential viewing.
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