GREEN BORDER (ZIELONA GRANICA) Luminaries

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival, this propulsive, urgent drama from Academy Award® nominee Agnieszka Holland (EUROPA EUROPA, SPOOR, AFI FEST 2017) depicts the crisis which erupted in 2021 at the Belarus-Poland border after Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko’s drew refugees to Belarus with false hope they might cross the border by foot into Poland and the EU. Opening with thriller-like momentum, the film follows a Sweden-bound family of Syrian refugees on such a journey, descending into terror as they quickly realize they’ve become trapped in a brutal, Kafkaesque game of ping pong between Polish and Belarusian border guards, who operate with impunity in the inhospitable “red zone” – the dense, swampy Białowieża Forest – that separates the two countries. Holland then quickly alternates perspectives, giving us windows into the lives of an Afghan English teacher, a conflicted Polish border guard, a group of activist lawyers and a psychiatrist whose tragic chance encounter with a fleeing refugee leads her to a newly found sense of responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe developing on her doorstep. Shot in stark black and white with a documentary-like urgency, GREEN BORDER is a powerful indictment of Europe’s hypocrisies around its refugee crisis from a master of bold, politically minded filmmaking. –Abbie Algar