Review by Beatrice On 06-Sep-2023
Divided into 5 chapters:
The family: Islamic, Syrian.
The guard: reactionary Polish anti-refugee propaganda and young border guard Jan, expecting a child by Kaska.
The activists: rules about what they can and cannot do to help refugees abandoned in the woods, dying.
Julia: her story as a psychoanalyst and her decision to offer her home as a base for the activists
Epilogue
The green border is that border between the Belarus of dictator Aleksandr Lukaschenko and the far-right Poland of Mateusz Morawiecki, president of the Council of Ministers since 2017, already active since the age of 12 in anti-communist activities in Poland.
African and Middle Eastern migrants entering Poland from Belarus, after violence and payments, under the illusion that they have finally reached Europe and thus the expected protection but brutally turned back at the border by the Polish government, which has erected a 186-kilometer wall to block entry.
An unbearable back and forth between the Polish and Russian borders strains the lives and endurance of these refugees at the mercy of a border area where they suffer cold, rain, hunger and especially thirst that can cost as much as 50 euros per bottle.
Helped by activists to identify their asylum claims and subjected to recordings to testify to their conditions of origin, they have to wait for their claims to be processed, while one of the children drowns in the swamp and the elderly family member decides not to get on the truck and while the European Union prohibits Poles from deporting refugees, but everything goes on undisturbed.
When asked where the politicians are and where the European community is, a thunderous laughter is heard and Julia begins her journey to help among the activists.
Bodies are thrown from one side of the border to the other while aid can only be carried out with medicine, food, clothes, shoes only where the refugees are, in the woods and no one can transport them by car or even take them in some facility.
Amidst happenings, chases, arrests, provocations, violence, cruelty Holland's film tries to open our eyes to a phenomenon that we know but have never seen with our own eyes: seeing it through a film is nonetheless an effective way to spread the drama of these lives.
A refugee, defined by Article 1 of the 1951 Geneva Convention, is "one who, being justifiably afraid of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion, is outside his country of which he is a national and is unable or unwilling, owing to this fear, to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having citizenship and being outside the country in which he had his habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or unwilling to return to it owing to the above fear."
Between 2021 and 2022 more than 30,000 people lost their lives in this geographic space, and the carnage is continuing while there are those who continue to try to pass through Poland to get to other areas.
We live in a world where great imagination and courage are needed to face all the challenges of our times, the director argues, the social media revolution and artificial intelligence have increasingly hindered the listening to authentic voices. In my opinion, there is no point in engaging in art if we do not fight for those voices, if we do not fight to ask questions about important, painful, sometimes unsolvable issues that confront us with dramatic scenes. This is exactly the situation taking place on the Polish-Belarusian border.
Agnieszcka Holland, points the finger at this geographic, human and inhuman space, in which atrocities and injustices are carried out, without anyone being able, except temporarily and partially, to provide relief, always in suspicion, distrust and hostility.
"I thought you were just a bourgeois woman who wants to cure her own self-esteem," argues an activist addressing Julia, but she will have to act in the most absolute illegality in order to save the lives of some African boys.
A somber, black-and-white window into the woods, through the swamps, frost, hunger and thirst to offer a portrait of what goes on undisturbed, between those who oppose acceptance, those who must try to survive in one way or another, and those who believe that one must fight and risk in order to save lives and enforce rights that are only on paper.
A reality in the face of which one may look away, may not see, may not know, may not understand but Holland wants to disturb by producing an art that is not an end in itself, dismantling the viewer's indifference through denunciation, questioning, engagement, struggle, resistance.
Karl Marx argued that "history always repeats itself twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce": here Holland shows us that tragedy and farce have entered into a contract and now coexist (s)pleasantly: most of the world's actors experience tragedy and only the remaining part farce.
The film is The barbed wire that runs through the uncomfortable, pungent, essential 147 minutes that trap the gaze, ensnaring it in a labyrinthine hell of absurdity, violence and death.
Humanity that treats the world as a world to be thrown away, also treats itself as a humanity to be thrown away.
06-Sep-2023 by Beatrice