Green Border

Agnieszka Holland's Green Border (Zielona granica) won the Special Jury Prize at Venice 2023. The film became the most politically consequential Polish film of recent years, the then-Polish government, in the months before the October 2023 election that ended its rule, formally denounced the film as anti-Polish-state propaganda, and Holland faced public threats and political pressure. The film opened in Polish cinemas during the campaign and became a continuing point of political controversy across the country.

The film is shot in stark black-and-white and weaves together three perspectives in the manufactured 2021-2022 humanitarian crisis at the Poland-Belarus forest border, where the Lukashenko government had been deliberately funnelling migrants from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan toward the EU border to destabilise Polish politics. Holland follows a Syrian-Iraqi refugee family attempting to cross into Poland (Jalal Altawil and Behi Djanati Atai); a young Polish border guard whose work the film slowly complicates (Tomasz Włosok); and a Warsaw activist (Maja Ostaszewska) volunteering with one of the small humanitarian groups attempting to provide medical and food support.

The film's commitment to procedural specificity (actual border-zone geography, actual Polish-Belarusian border-fence construction, the legal and political mechanisms by which both governments had pushed people into the forest) produced one of the most-cited works of contemporary European political cinema. Holland's career-long engagement with Polish historical and political subjects (Europa Europa, In Darkness) has continued through her late period; this is among her strongest recent works.