Female Film Critics 24/375
This is an unambiguously upsetting, distressing viewing experience, and it should be. Yet Agnieszka Holland is never exploitative, but also never softens or shirks from what is a genuinely harrowing story. Green Border is not an easy watch, but it is an indescribably important one, and one of Holland’s most humane and compassionate works yet.
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Harrowing in its brutal depiction of the way that refugees from Africa and the Middle East are treated by authorities on both sides of the vicious barbed-wire fence between Belarus and Poland, Agnieszka Holland’s riveting drama Green Border begs viewers to pay attention to the tragic consequences of dehumanizing the vulnerable people who need help the most. It’s a difficult film to watch — which is exactly why it needs to be seen.
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Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border is a documentary-like geopolitical drama about a group of disparate refugees who are seeking asylum from political unrest and poverty in their various homelands. The ‘Green Border’ referred to in the title is a no go zone on both sides of a barbed wire fence that demarks the border between Belarus and Poland. It is a border that refugees from oppressive countries in Africa and the Middle East are desperate to cross because they expect to find safe passage through Poland to freedom and a better life in the European Union. However, they find that safe passage is elusive, if not impossible. Because neither Belarus nor Poland wants them, they are brutally rejected by violent border guards that are commissioned by the virulently right wing xenophobic governments on both sides of the barbed wire.
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At a time when the governors of Texas and Florida are callously using refugees as political pawns, The Swimmers is a must-watch movie that puts individual human faces to the staggering number of people escaping war-torn countries to find a safe place to live. Almost seven million Syrians have become refugees since 2011 when civil war broke out, and The Swimmers, which is based on a true story, solidly focuses on two of them while never losing sight of the rest.
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Overwhelming numbers suggest the scope of the Syrian refugee situation, but not the true human cost.
For that, we need documentaries like Simple as Water. The latest from Oscar-winner Megan Mylan (Lost Boys of Sudan), the haunting — and achingly human — Simple as Water focuses on four different Syrian families struggling to move on with their lives.