Agata Kubis/Metro Films
Among her numerous achievements, Polish auteur Agnieszka Holland helmed multiple excellent episodes of HBO’s The Wire, and she brings that series’ blend of docudrama realism and suspenseful urgency to Green Border, an impassioned portrait of men and women navigating a crisis without easy solution or foreseeable end. Screening at this year’s New York Film Festival, Holland’s latest is a tad distended, resulting in repetition that undercuts its power, even as it also shies away from presenting the larger forces at play in its calamity. Nonetheless, its anger is matched by its empathy, both which abound in its tale of woe set in the nightmarish region between Belarus and Poland.
Green Border opens with an aerial shot of its primary forest setting transitioning from color to ashy black-and-white, followed by a 2021 scene inside an airplane, whose passengers include a family of Syrians—father Bashir (Jalal Altawil), mother Amina (Dalia Naous), Amina’s father (Mohamad Al Rash), and their three children Nur (Taim Ajjan), Ghania (Talia Ajjan), and infant Mahir (Sebabastian Svaton)—as well as Afghanistan native Leila (Behi Djanati-Atai).
Aside from a late image of birds flying in V-shape formation, it’s the last time Holland’s film nears the heavens. Once they land in Belarus, the clan agrees to give Leila a lift on their way to Poland, which is the next stop on a journey intended to conclude in Switzerland. No sooner have they hit the road, though, than trouble materializes in the form of a driver who stops in a remote woodland spot beside armed soldiers, demands an additional $300 as ransom, and kicks them out of the vehicle, at which point they’re ushered under a barbed-wire fence into Poland.