A film by Agnieszka Holland
With: Jalal Altawil, Maja Ostaszewska, Tomasz Włosok, Behi Djanati Atai, Mohamad Al Rashi, Dalia Naous, Malwina Buss, Monika Frajczyk, Piotr Stramowski, Jaśmina Polak
The fates of a Syrian refugee family, a lonely English teacher from Afghanistan and a young border guard, who all meet at the border between Poland and Belarus.
Our Review 1: *
On paper, The Green Border, from which we expected much more, allows itself the luxury of abandoning its characters in the first third of the story, replacing them with others, and filling every narrative gap with a dramatic episode that, relying far too much on pathos, loses all intensity and credibility. We still wonder why Agnieszka Holland, who has touched on a lovely subject that nonetheless sends out a necessary cry of alarm, didn’t opt for a far more naturalistic narrative, which could reach us and make us think much more than the very clumsy and imprecise fiction (why are Moroccans trying to get to Sweden via Belarus? why so many pregnant women? why deaths drowned in swamps? why a seemingly more positive episode where a wealthy family welcomes young Africans in what looks like a luxury air bnb?) … The questions asked are the right ones (why act differently with the Ukraine than with sub-Saharan or Eastern migrants? what solutions can be found to really stem the daily drama? what motivates those who help, struggle and fight for a cause, and on the contrary, those who don’t give a damn, or add inhumanity to misery?) The filmmaker’s 360-degree intention is commendable (try to cover all the bases, take into account different points of view, and let the viewer choose which one to support or identify with), but The Green Border is far too much of a supported fiction, with no finesse, to shed any light, initiate any reflection, or even move anyone… One wonders (we’ll come back to this with the failed Io Capitano on a similar subject) whether the urgency of such a subject, its hypersensitivity, would almost prohibit tackling it from the angle of fiction, with a distance as disturbing as the distance with which our societies watch, without acting, these tragedies repeat themselves…
Our Review 2: ***