Screening of the film “Green Border” by Agnieszka Holland in the Czech Republic during the 50th Letní filmová škola Uherské Hradiště

“Green Border” is one of the most important and widely discussed films in the Polish media in recent years. Agnieszka Holland takes us to the Polish-Belarusian border and the humanitarian crisis there. As the esteemed director stated in an interview: “We wanted to show the complexity of the situation, the complexity of human nature and the choices we face. So that there is not an ounce of propaganda in the film. (…) I wanted the film to have maximum credibility. For everything I show on the screen, I have papers.” Holland takes an almost documentary approach to this “apocalypse of everyday life,” the existential limbo in which refugees from Syria or Afghanistan in particular have had to endure.
With black-and-white cinematography, the Polish director portrays a world in which the painful absurdity and zero-sidedness of the situation (good/evil, compassion/envy, life/death) is far from any shades of gray. In “The Green Border,” moreover, we have a threefold mode of storytelling: the perspective of refugees, almost absent from the Polish debate of the time, being tossed from place to place (1), the accounts of male and female activists risking their own health (2), and the observation of one of the border guards (3). The filmmaker takes us on an uneasy, sometimes very drastic journey, but she does not forget about light and hope. With her latest film, Holland reminds us that socio-politically engaged cinema can serve as a valuable tool for unraveling fragments of a reality tainted by violence and indifference.