“Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance” – Laurie Halse Anderson.

This September, dread and anxiety spread among Polish government ministers. The cause? Green Border: a feature film about the inhumane treatment of migrants at the Polish-Belarusian border, directed by Agnieszka Holland. Don’t be fooled, Green Border is not a horror film. There are no monsters or jump scares. Rather, there is just the display of a horror-like reality of the government’s xenophobia-fuelled brutality towards refugees that they never wanted Polish citizens to see.
For many citizens, the government’s suspicious overreaction and return to World War II rhetoric — labeling the film as “Nazi propaganda” and, in reaction to it, returning to the slogan “only pigs sit in cinemas,” which was used to promote cinema boycotts across Poland in 1941 in response to an actual Nazi propaganda film, Heimkehr by Gustav Ucicky — was a sufficient alternative to personally experiencing a two-and-a-half-hour movie (reflected in the thousands of low ratings that appeared on the Polish film review service Filmweb before the film’s public release). What the government did not expect is that, for most of the Polish public, this rhetoric made Green Border a forbidden fruit film that demanded to be seen.
This reviewer (and Polish citizen) decided against trusting the government’s film reviewing skills and, instead, found herself as one of the aforementioned “pigs” sitting in the cinema, gripping her chair and holding her breath, as she slowly began to understand the power of the feature film as an art form.
From the very first shot, Holland does not conceal the complexity of the story that she tells. As the camera slowly travels above a vast green forest, the color slowly drains out, until the audience is left with a black-and-white image of dense woodland and the title, Green Border. This paradox — the word “green” written over a black-and-white background — is not an accident. It is Holland’s way of making it clear to us that the scenes we are about to witness are not black-and-white situations in the slightest, and that there are no clear good or evil sides in the tense politicized moment she is capturing. Holland doesn’t expect us to pick a side — rather, she wants us to understand the nuance of conflict.
Like in her other films, Holland is not interested in offering a birds-eye-view of the socio-political infrastructure. In Fever (1981), three storylines with distinct characters are interconnected by the simple fact that they are all alive at a revolutionary time, during Poland’s fight for independence in the early 1900s; in the academy-nominated Europa Europa (1991), the challenges of being Jewish during World War II are fused into the story of one main character, Solomon Perel. In Green Border, various human perspectives enable the audience to come away with a more complex understanding of the border tragedy. By presenting us with a mosaic of individual experiences of refugees, activists, and border guards, Holland challenges the simplistic and unified image that grand political and media narratives put forth in 2021 — portraying migrants as a large enough threat to justify a state of emergency in Poland.
That is the power of this feature film: it breaks the detachment caused by modern news overload and reignites public empathy. In Holland’s own words, Green Border “can open the hearts and minds of some people.” For this reviewer, the portrayal of mixed perspectives in the film accomplished just that.
The Refugees
The first perspective depicted in the film unfolds with a Syrian family on a plane bound for Belarus. Rather than beginning with a depiction of refugees at the border, Holland strategically chooses the airplane setting to present an element of commonality between the film’s viewers and the refugee family — these are people we might have sat next to on a carefree summer vacation flight. Holland knows that the initial subconscious bond that the audience forms with the characters is essential to achieving her aim of a conscious moral awakening. The director’s ability to instantaneously make audiences relate to on-screen characters reveals her genius, not only as a filmmaker, but also as an anthropologist.
With her deep understanding of human behavior, Holland weaves an emotionally resonant sound motif into the narrative of the refugee family, seamlessly transitioning between different storylines. Throughout the flight scene, we hear cries from the family’s youngest child echo amid hopeful casual conversations about the future. That same cry later resurfaces in a drastically different context. The family, accompanied by an English teacher from Afghanistan, Leila (Behi Djanati Atai), is forced to cross the Belarusian border. At the Polish side of the border, surrounded only by trees, yet still hopeful that they’re heading to a better world, we no longer see the refugees in the safety of a cushioned airplane seat: a close-up reveals the family and Leila sleeping on cold, leaf-covered ground. The shot is so intimate that we witness their flinches and winces as raindrops touch their still-unscarred faces. As the rain intensifies, we hear the baby’s familiar cry.

About an hour into the movie, against the backdrop of border guards shouting and confronting refugees in the dark of night, at a point when the viewer’s anger at scenes of inhumanity starts to overshadow their empathy for the individuals entrapped in the chaos, Holland does it again: the haunting sound of the baby’s cry pierces through the screams and audible punches.
The repeated cry is an example of contrast and connection — it helps the viewer to emotionally reconnect with the refugee narrative and highlights the juxtaposition between the innocent cries we hear at the beginning and the distressed cries in subsequent scenes. It solidifies both the continuation of, and reconnection with, what can arguably be deemed the central storyline in Green Border. Holland’s inclusion of these seemingly insignificant yet humane moments is at the heart of Green Border’s artistry.
The Activists and Julia
Another perspective showcased in the film is that of a woman named Julia (Maja Ostaszewska) and a group of activists — whose stories do not initially seem to be part of the same narrative. Julia is a psychologist, who happens to be living alone next to the border. The activists, meanwhile, are hippie-like youths, channeling their fury at the government into their efforts to assist refugees within the confines of the state of emergency area.
Their stories become intertwined after one harrowing scene, which haunts the memory long after the end credits roll. It is a moment in the film where Holland highlights that her goal was not a “rose-tinted-glasses” kind of experience, but a “disturbingly authentic” one. In the scene, Julia is standing in her garden at night — an ordinary act which Holland makes appear menacing with her choice of an oddly monochrome color scheme, despite the setting. The scene that unfolds could be used as a step-by-step guide to perfectly directing a build-up of horror. A scream breaks the silence. Julia runs towards the scream and finds an Afghan woman (who the audience, by this point in the film, knows as Leila) drowning in a swamp, desperately trying to hold onto a little boy (known to the audience as Nur). The two women — and the viewer — watch as Nur is swallowed by the swamp, both women unable to save him.
Up until this point, Holland draws our attention so intimately close to her meticulously crafted, complex characters that we find ourselves standing right beside these women. Cinematic apathy becomes impossible. For some viewers (i.e., politicians), this may raise ethical questions about the abuse of power by the director: is Holland emotionally manipulating the viewer with extreme, fictional depictions of death and violence?
For others, these dramatic interpretations are another example of Holland achieving her purpose with Green Border: increasing awareness about an issue that was hidden from the public. Would a documentary offer a more accurate portrayal of refugee deaths at the Polish border? Possibly. However, the state of emergency in the country meant that the media could not enter the border’s woodland zone, as refugees died in the cold. Instead, Holland found an avenue to bypass political silencing: the language of cinema.
The Guard
The portrayal of a guard, Jan (Tomasz Wlosok), is a focal point for most of the criticism directed at Green Border. Polish border guards judged that Holland’s depiction of Jan is an attack on the profession and a misrepresentation of reality, but this is not the case. You might draw these conclusions if you only watch a few specific scenes and decontextualize them from the rest of the film. When watching the film in its entirety, it becomes clear that Holland does not include Jan’s narrative as a provocation. Jan’s role in the film is to act as a representative of the “structure versus agency” debate, a trope the director has used before. In various scenes, Jan uses brute force against the refugees, justifying this as his “duty.” While this makes the audience unlikely to empathize with Jan’s character, Holland’s nuanced lens does not make us hate him. In other scenes, we see Jan alone in his car, hysterically crying and hitting the wheel; we see him abusing alcohol; we see him lying in a fetal position, naked and vulnerable, next to his wife. By showing us these moments, Holland makes it clear that this character is not a black-and-white villain, but rather a real human being whom we are meant to sympathize with as he struggles to make a moral judgment.
The director’s depiction of a pregnant refugee who is violently thrown over a barbed wire fence by border guards is made more harrowing when contrasted with the picture-perfect presentation of Jan’s pregnant wife. This is one of the few times when Holland resorts to extremes. Maybe such scenes could have been avoided to limit negative reactions from certain audiences, but by this point in the film, it is hard to imagine that a positive response was ever the director’s objective. The goal of Green Border was clearly to highlight the power of cinema, to use fiction as an informative tool when real-life events were hidden by the state. Holland wanted to raise questions that the viewer inevitably must ask oneself long after the cinema screen goes blank.
The Politics

While this is a film review, and not intended as a rebuke of a specific government, when a government attempts to incite backlash against particular films, or even censor directors from distributing their films — seen in the cases of Clergy by Wojciech Smarzowski and Polityka by Patryk Vega —, cinema inevitably becomes political.
I watched Green Border on October 15th, 2023. This happened to be the day of the Polish parliamentary elections. Coincidentally, as I left the theater, I found out that the majority government, which tried to stop people from watching the film I had just viewed, had lost its majority in parliament. It was an election with the highest turnout in this century.
Is cinema so powerful that Green Border potentially influenced these election results? That is a question left unanswered, but maybe not the one that should be asked. After all, Agnieszka Holland was not looking for votes — she just wanted to tell a story to an audience. That is the power of Green Border: it’s a brave film made by a director ready to speak up against politicians who thought they could control their fabricated narrative.
With Green Border, Agnieszka Holland reminds us that feature film is an art form that should not be taken for granted.