The green border

«We live in a world where great imagination and courage are needed to face all the challenges of our times. The social media revolution and artificial intelligence have increasingly hindered authentic voices from being heard. In my opinion, there is no point in engaging in art if we don't fight for those voices, if we don't 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 border between Poland and Belarus."
These are the words of the 75-year-old Polish director Agnieszka Holland pronounced at the Venice Film Festival last September at the presentation of her latest work (capable of deserving the Grand Jury Prize), The green border, that part of land of swampy forests that separates the Belarus from Poland, from Europe.
A border perhaps less known to us Italians but equally complex compared to similar situations in the Mediterranean described by Matteo Garrone in I, Captain.

If Garrone, despite the crudeness of the images, was also fascinated by dreamlike scenarios among the desert dunes, Holland comes closer to the documentary dimension by shooting the film in a dramatic black/white which brings it closer to a photojournalistic reportage that closely follows refugees from the Middle East and Africa trying to reach the European Union and finding themselves trapped in a geopolitical crisis. Pawns of this hidden war, the lives of Julia, a recently trained activist who has given up on a comfortable existence, Jan, a young border guard, and a Syrian family are intertwined.
The film is divided into chapters in an episodic narrative which nevertheless brings together the parties involved, faithful to the complexity of reality.

Holland, thanks not only to her talent but also to her experience of life and civil cinema, creates a necessary and courageous work that moves, but also makes us reflect on the complexity of a cynical and cruel world which, when faced with refugees, forgets those principles of justice, equality and solidarity on which Europe should be founded.

Davide Bracco
NP February 2024