ZIELONA GRANICA (GREEN BORDER)
Venezia 80 – In Competition
Zielona granica, Poland/France/Czech Republic/Belgium, 2023. Director Agnieszka Holland. With Jalal Altawil, Maja Ostaszewska, Tomasz Włosok, Behi Djanati Atai, Mohamad Al Rashi, Dalia Naous. Duration 2h 27‘.
Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, the severe humanitarian and political crisis narrated by director Agnieszka Holland in Green Border (Zielona granica), in competition at the 80th Venice Film Festival, was already underway (and still is): we are talking about the situation on the “green border,” the one between Belarus of dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko and Poland of Mateusz Morawiecki’s far-right. African and Middle Eastern migrants attempt to enter Poland from Belarus. Still, they are brutally turned back at the border by the Polish government, which has erected a 186-kilometre wall to block entry. This scenario was also recently recounted by Kasia Smutniak in the (upcoming) documentary Mur. It was only a matter of time before Agnieszka Holland did so. The Polish filmmaker told in her movies the darkest pages of the Old Continent’s history for decades, such as Nazi crimes and World War II in Oscar-nominated Europa Europa (1990) and In Darkness (2011). Holland also has meaningful collaborations in Anglo-American film and TV (she directed, among others, Leonardo DiCaprio and David Thewlis in the 1995 Total Eclipse, and also episodes of series such as The Wire, House of Cards, Cold Case, and The Killing). Green Border focus on a few figures: activist Julia, young border guard Jan and a Syrian family. “We live in a world where great imagination and courage are needed to face all the challenges of our times,” Holland said. “The social media revolution and artificial intelligence have increasingly hindered listening to authentic voices. In my view, there is no point in engaging in the art unless we fight for those voices unless we fight to ask questions about important, painful, sometimes unsolvable issues that confront us with dramatic choices. This is exactly the situation taking place on the Polish-Belarusian border.”
