Agnieszka Holland's Green Border is a handsome and well meaning film focusing on the migrant crisis in Europe. The film begins with an overhead shot of a green forest straddling the Polish-Belarus border. Holland switches to black and white and retains that choice for the remainder of this somber 153 minute flick. Holland and her collaborators have fashioned a polemic that interweaves different sets of protagonists (a Syrian refugee family, a border guard, a group of activists, and a therapist who becomes radicalized by the refugee's plight) into a fitfully effective effort. Holland's desire to posit Green Border as a rebuke to the nationalistic impulses in her country's causes it to lapse into heavy handedness, the Lord's Prayer is chanted at one point as an act of protest, but the picture remains a vivid one.
The Syrian family suffers so many depredations and calumnies in the first few reels that the effect is exhausting rather than enlightening as Belarus and Polish border squads treat the refugees as hot potatoes. I'll give it to old Agnieszka, though, no director that kills a child onscreen by having him drown in a bog is pulling her punches. The cast is generally quite good, but somewhat dwarfed by the film's scope. Maja Ostaszewska portrayal of the therapist is particularly memorable. A coda set on the Polish Ukrainian border after Russia's invasion reunites some of the character and refocuses us on the claims that the refugee crisis was, at least in part, ginned up by the machinations of Vladimir Putin And Belarus' leader Lukashenko. Still, Holland's primary focus is on the refugees caught in the maelstrom of global politic. Overwrought at times, Green Border never loses sight of a common humanity that abides despite the many horrors contained within the director's work.
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