LGM Film Club, Part 424: Green Border
By 
Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border is a brilliant film and very difficult to watch, in the same way that the greatest films about the Holocaust are. Holland has never shied away from Poland’s difficult history and is happy to challenge the government, channeling other Polish directors from Andrzej Wajda to Paweł Pawlikowski. But here she really goes at the heart of modern Polish fascism. In 2021, the scumbag dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, decided to use migrants as a tool to shove Europe’s hypocrisy in its face. He gave free flights to refugees from the Middle East and Africa to Belarus, took them to the border, and then basically beat them into Poland. Meanwhile, the far-right Polish government responded like Nazis, beating and killing them, forcing them back into Belarus. Over and over and over again, these refugees were bounced back and forth, often dying, sometimes making it past the Zone of Exclusion and getting to some kind of freedom as they moved west. Even I was barely aware of this at the time and for that, I feel shame.
Holland films this horror from three perspectives. The first is a family from Syria, along with an Afghani woman fleeing the Taliban, trying to gain their freedom. The second is a border guard who hates this job but has a young family and doesn’t know what to do. The third is a small group of brave dissenters trying to help the migrants, especially a once indifferent psychiatrist who witnesses two of the people we saw escaping drowning in the swamp near her house (and if you want to see devastatingly powerful scenes….well, this is tough that’s what I would say). Holland spares no one here and, well, again, it’s like a Holocaust film because what has happened to these migrants compares, if not in mass numbers, in the sheer hell of being hated and persecuted and murdered when all you want is to live.
The Polish government called Holland a Nazi and stooge of Putin for portraying this. Mercifully, the Polish people finally kicked out that government, well, for now anyway. As we know in the United States, just because you get rid of the fascists doesn’t mean that the fascists don’t come back. Unlike many of you, I have not done the mental gymnastics to be oh so sure that Harris is going to win. Maybe she will, maybe she won’t, but the certainty some of you have talked yourselves into is probably not great. But even if Harris squeeks this out, and please God may she, fascism is not going away in this country, not by a long shot.
Watching this film as an American did again make me realize the effectiveness of exposing liberal hypocrisy. Lukashenko thought all this was hilarious. So does Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis when they round up migrants and ship them to New York or Chicago or Washington. And lo and behold, people in those supposedly liberal cities start freaking out when the migrants come! That’s because we are hypocrites. It works because there’s truth to it. Abbott and DeSantis were basically right. It worked with Europe too. I mean, even too many of the usually liberal commenters here are pretty damn wobbly on immigration and that disgusts me. Look into your souls. Obviously many of you see through that bullshit and good for you, but we all know that too many purported liberals will start talking about housing prices and community values and such when lots of migrants start showing up.
Well, the final thought here as an American is this–if and when Trump wins, what are you going to do about the mass deportations? Just complain? As Holland shows, there are things people can do. The rescuers are portrayed as pretty flawed in their own right; she definitely rolls her eyes as some of these people and their put-ons. But by God they are doing something about it. What will you do? Hell, what will I do?
Holland ends Green Border by recreating the migration of Ukrainian refugees a year later, in 2022, when Russia started its war. In that case, the same cops throwing pregnant women over barbed wire fences are welcoming white refugees and their birds and cats onto nice buses. I can’t think of a better end to this film.
10/10 and almost certainly the best film released in this country in 2024, but I don’t think I can ever watch it again. It gave me nightmares. I expect it to win Best Foreign Film at the Oscars and quite possibly Best Picture if Trump wins. It’s streaming as a rental on most of your streaming services. I had to watch it all at once even though I stayed up too late because I knew if I paused it, I would not have the internal fortitude to start it again.