Dhe city of Harasta in Syria is only a few kilometers away from the capital Damascus. There was a time when the uprising against the dictator Assad was so strong that Harasta was counted among the liberated areas. The regime is now consolidated and in ruins. And many residents of Harasta have fled to Jordan, Turkey or Europe. In Agnieszka Holland's “Green Border” the name of the city is mentioned casually.
One detail among many in a film in which every little thing is important. A family of several people comes from Harasta, from grandfathers to toddlers, who come across the green border from Belarus to Poland. They want to go to Sweden without knowing much about it, but the name of the Scandinavian state is a clue for them.
The “Green Border” becomes the apex
These are the months in which the local dictator Lukashenko is also playing a nasty game with the European Union on behalf of, or at least in the spirit of, the larger dictator Putin. People from Syria and other countries are flown to Minsk and then abandoned at the EU's external border. There is a government in power in Poland that wants nothing to do with European solidarity and is also openly xenophobic.
The family from Harasta is a shifting mass in this constellation. And in a terribly literal way. Because Agnieszka Holland describes this exemplary fate in such a way that the “Green Border” becomes a vertex. This is where it is decided, individually and systemically, what happens next with humanity, humanity. First of all, individual, because that is the domain of a feature film, which clearly tends towards representation, but does so through a collection of individual cases.
On a wet, gray morning (the film is shot in black and white), the group from Syria finds themselves in the forest on the Polish side of the border. With them is a woman from Afghanistan, her name is Laila, and she later mentions that her brother worked as a translator for the Polish troops in Afghanistan. From this she derives a special claim to protection, probably rightly so, but for the time being she doesn't come close to an instance in which she could present arguments. Laila speaks English, but that doesn't mean she can read the situation better. And her cell phone battery will soon be just as empty as everyone else's.
Agnieszka Holland takes her time to make the characters individual: the grandfather who, despite being exhausted and thirsty, doesn't want to miss the morning prayer; the children who, fortunately, do not fully understand the seriousness of the situation.
Laila meets a man in a field who gives her a bottle of water and two apples, but then picks up the phone – she has now realized that they are by no means welcome in Poland and is afraid that he will call the police. She panics and runs back into the forest. A little later everyone is back in Belarus. Victim of a pushback, now dangerously thirsty. One of the soldiers charges 50 euros for a bottle of water.
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