2024-02-06 22:44:24
by Paolo Mereghetti
«Green Border», a work by Polish director Agnieszka Holland, boycotted at home, denounces the abuse of migrants on the border with Belarus
In a world that seems to want to forget the meaning of some values, first of all respect for the human person, Agnieszka Holland’s film wants to forcefully remind us that where human contempt and racial hatred exist and – alas – thrive, certain principles they must be defended and put into practice. And with Green Border (winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival) the 75-year-old Polish director gives us a good example, reconstructing what has happened in recent years in her country, a Poland which at the time of the film, set in 2021 with a final appendix in 2023, was led by the Morawiecki government, a member of the far-right PiS (Law and Justice) party, clerical, nationalist and illiberal. Government which, before the change following the elections which took place in October, harshly attacked the work, pushing the Polish Oscar commission not to nominate it in the best international film category.
By choosing black and white (this consonance of style with Paola Cortellesi’s There’s Still Tomorrow is curious, as if for “tragedies”, whether public or private, the realism of color risks attenuating the drama), the film follows the odyssey of a family of Syrian immigrants whom we meet on a plane that is taking them from Turkey to Belarus: they hope to be able to easily enter Poland (as they were led to believe) where a minibus should be waiting for them to take them to Sweden to an uncle , and on which they also give a lift to an Afghan immigrant, intending to ask for political asylum. But when they arrive close to the border they discover that the reality is very different: extortion, false promises, violence. Whoever seemed kind turns out to be a masked tormentor.
On both sides of the fences that mark the division between Belarus and Poland, the soldiers of the two countries reveal themselves to be cynical predators: they charge an exorbitant price for a bottle of water, they enjoy inflicting humiliation on people and they seem to enjoy themselves to push them back every time to the other side of the border, doing every atrocity (for example returning a thermos after breaking the glass inside so that the drinker cuts his throat). And if it is moving to see, in the abandonment of a desolate and inhospitable land, the old Syrian head of a family trying to respect the rules of daily prayer, immediately afterwards the scenes of violence and inhumanity take over.
Champion of a cinema capable of questioning the spectator, Holland divides her film into different parts, to let us know the protagonists of this human odyssey. Thus, after having introduced us to the family who is experiencing first-hand the exchange of responsibility (to use a euphemism) between Poland and Belarus, one of the soldiers assigned to the border service enters the field, just as he is attending one of the briefings on the danger that immigrants represent, “terrorists, pedophiles and zoophiles” to quote the portrait presented to them by the Polish authorities. And immediately after, the film goes on to tell the commitment of the activists who defy the authorities’ bans to bring help to the immigrants who wander in the “green zone”, that no man’s land that the Polish army presides over and where access is prohibited ( and which Kasia Smutniak put at the center of her beautiful documentary Mur).
And so, alternating points of view and delving into now this situation, now that situation, explaining the problems and recounting the dramas (because death inevitably ends up making its tragic appearance), Holland chooses not to hide her point of view (well aware that “objectivity” does not exist) and to underline her feeling directly involved in a politics that involves her first as a citizen and consequently as a director. Yet it is precisely this declared choice of field that offers the viewer the elements to understand and interpret what she sees on the screen and ask him which side to take. As the young people do in the finale – Poles and immigrants – who overcome every type of barrier in the name of music. And that the pharisaical ending on the arrival of the Ukrainian migrants seals without the need for words.
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February 6, 2024 (modified February 6, 2024 | 11:44 pm)
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