At the 80th edition of the Venice Film Festival, Matteo Garrone’s film "Io Capitano", won the Silver Lion for Best Director, while the Special Jury Prize was awarded to "Zielona Granica" (Green Border) by Agnieszka Holland. Both the films tell stories of migrants and refugees.
In Holland's brutal drama, the Polish film-maker follows the vicissitudes of a group of people - refugees from Syria, a Polish border guard and a woman who joins Polish activists.
Their lives intertwine at the "green border", the forests between Belarus and Poland. While the film is a fiction, the stories it tells are inspired by real-life events in 2021 when thousands of refugees from the Middle East and Africa were trapped in hazardous conditions on the EU's eastern frontier.
Making them believe that they could have crossed on foot into Poland and be in the European Union through the Białowieża Forest, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko authorized the entry of asylum seekers in his country. However, this act was not a humanitarian gesture, but a way to revenge towards the European Union's sanctions against Belarus and put Poland under pressure.
The refugees turned indeed into political pawns, used by Lukashenko and then mistreated by Polish border patrol that in turn reacted by pushing them back and condemning them to a life of hardship and even death in the forests.
This situation has pushed Poland towards xenophobia, something that benefits Lukashenko (but also Russian President Vladimir Putin).
Shot in dramatic black and white, the film is a way to ponder on human behavior in the interactions between its characters.
In the film there are indeed moments of ambiguity and fear, such as when a Polish farmer helps a refugee, but triggers suspicions he may be alerting the authorities about her presence, or when a Belarusian border guard degrades a refugee over the price of water. These incidents, alongside physical violence, erode the characters' sense of humanity, generating fear and mistrust among them, and insinuating doubts and moral qualms (the border guard in Poland expected to carry out brutal actions, begins to question their necessity).
One final dilemma appears towards the end of the film, with a final note on the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and the border force receiving thousands of Ukrainian refugees, compared to the smaller number of darker-skinned refugees from Africa and the Middle East rejected at the border.
The film has got a dichotomic structure with sections that call to mind movies about the Eastern Front during the Second World War, and more futuristic parts that represent tales of survival in a world that has lost its humanity and that point at the post-apocalyptic genre.
But while the film serves as crucial cinematic testimony to the current events unfolding in Europe and received positive reviews from critics, it was condemned by Polish government officials.
The film was released in Poland two days ago by Kino Świat, just weeks before the country's pivotal migration-focused elections (on October 15; on the same day of the elections, the government has scheduled a referendum on migration policy).
The right-wing conservative government is strongly opposing the film (that some politicians haven't even watched...) as it claims it tarnishes Poland's reputation.
Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the right-wing populist and national-conservative Law and Justice party (PiS; the party aims to secure a third term in power thanks to its anti-immigration stance; yet a visa fraud scandal reportedly linked to consulates in Asia and Africa, where visas were allegedly issued in exchange for bribes, has somewhat undermined the government's credibility on this issue) and Deputy Prime Minister of Poland, organized a press conference last week to criticize the film.
During the conference, he expressed his belief that the portrayal of Poland's border guards, army, and police was deeply derogatory; Polish officials also argue that security personnel protected Poland from a migration flow instigated by Lukashenko and Putin.
Kaczynski claimed that Holland is aligning with Putin's supposed agenda and accused her of "oikophobia," a contempt for her own homeland.
Stanisław Żaryn, the government's plenipotentiary for the security of the Polish information space, accused Holland of being "out of touch with reality" and making "insinuations used to attack Poland, Poles, and the government." Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro, of the Catholic nationalist Sovereign Poland party (part of a governing alliance with the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS), which is leading in polls ahead of the national elections with a campaign focused on migration, and on the wall constructed between 2021 and 2022 on the border with Belarus to keep out refugees), likened the film (though he admitted he hadn't watched it) to Nazi Germany propaganda, and in a separate address, referred to Holland as a Stalinist.
Holland, whose father was Jewish and whose mother, a Roman Catholic, took part in the Polish resistance against the Nazi occupation, demanded an apology from Ziobro and announced her intent to pursue defamation charges against him.
President Andrzej Duda also criticized the film, suggesting that a better choice would have been a film focusing on Poland's response to Russia's war in Ukraine.
Besides, right-wing groups targeted social media pages and film-related websites promoting the movie in Poland, attempting to disrupt screenings attended by Holland.
Yet the film, born out of Holland's frustration with the government's handling of Poland's emergence as a migration route (she felt it was her duty to shoot it), serves as a deeper pondering on the collective loss of humanity and as a reflection on the geopolitical factors that push individuals to their limits. The traumatized border guard, tormented by his actions and the attitudes of his colleagues, turns indeed into another victim in this narrative.
When governments and politicians express fear of artworks, books, or films and argue that they cast their country in a negative light, it often indicates that these works are addressing crucial issues. In 1959, after the release of Vittorio De Sica's neorealist masterpiece "Umberto D", about a pensioner living in Italy and struggling to get by and contemplating suicide, Giulio Andreotti, at the time Undersecretary for Entertainment, stated: "While it's true that evil can also be fought by exposing its rawest aspects, it's also true that if people are mistakenly led to believe that Umberto D. represents Italy in the mid-20th century, De Sica will have done a disservice to his homeland."
The main aim of Agnieszka Holland's "Green Border" is not paying a disservice to Poland, but calling all governments worldwide to reflect on the plight of migrants and refugees, urging us all to contemplate our humanity in a world where it seems to be steadily diminishing. When the director received the Special Jury Award at the Venice Film Festival, she emphasized that the situation at the border remains unchanged: "People are still hiding in forests, deprived and stripped of their dignity, their human rights and their safety; some of them will lose their lives here in Europe, not because we don't have the resources to help them, but because we don't want to."
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