“Green Border” gives a voice to refugee experiences in Poland

Jalal Altawil, far right, and Talia Ajjan in “Green Border”. (Agata Kubis/Kino Lorber/TNS)

Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s award-winning film “Green Border,” which opens Friday at the Coolidge Corner Theater, offers a comprehensive, insightful look at the immigration crisis that has erupted along Poland’s border with Belarus, a Russian ally.

The two-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker uses black and white to capture the various elements that interact for refugees – with life-or-death consequences in the so-called exclusion zone, where these supplicants are pawns.

Holland divides the film into chapters, beginning with “October 2021 Europe,” and opens on a plane. We follow a determined single Afghan woman who makes the journey alone, a multigenerational Syrian family with a grandfather and three children. Later, we see a border guard disgusted by the brutality and death he is forced to witness while his pregnant wife waits to give birth. And there’s a local Polish woman who feels driven to activism to help these helpless refugees from the Middle East and Africa. She is arrested for her efforts, stripped naked, and photographed as a criminal.

“I decided to make the film months after the crisis began at the Polish borders,” Holland, 75, began in English in a telephone interview. “And I realized where this was going. At the same time, the Polish government decided to seal off the zone around the border and deny access to the media – and also to non-governmental organizations, medical organizations and activists.

“So it was virtually impossible to honestly document what was going on with a documentary. I started thinking that this is the moment to create fiction that resembles reality and shows something that is going on.

“But we recreate the situations and try to give the people who are part of this situation their voice and their face and give them the space so that we can understand what decisions they are facing. Or when they have no choice.”

Since “Green Border” is an independent production, Holland said there was nothing wrong with shooting the film in black and white.

She said it was a conscious decision because “I wanted to make the connection to a documentary – and also to history. To the films from World War II.”

“In that situation at the border, it became very relevant for many people. They told me, ‘Oh, it’s like during the Holocaust,’ or ‘It was exactly what my grandmother told me.’

“And also, some of the images came back. And some habits of the uniform. A man is always a nice guy up until now and suddenly they scream and throw the child over the barbed wire fence. So yes, I wanted the documentary rawness and the metaphorical at the same time.”

“Green Border” opens Friday at the Coolidge Theater