Later, we learn that Leila is from Afghanistan and wants to seek asylum in Poland. The family try to strike up a conversation with a woman sitting next to them, Leila (Behi Djanati Atai), only to realize that she speaks no Arabic, only English and her native tongue. Accompanying Bashir are his father (Mohamad Al Rashi), Bashir’s wife Amina (Dalia Naous), pre-adolescent son Nur (Taim Ajjan), his younger sister Ghalia (Talia Ajjan) and a toddler who is still breastfeeding. Bashir (Jalal Altawil, a Syrian refugee himself) literally has scars on his back from a run-in with ISIS. But the people we meet traveling on a Turkish plane in the film’s first scene have no idea this was a cruel trick, designed by Belarus to make their EU-member neighbors look like the bad guys when they refuse to extend asylum to the refugees and send them back over the border.Īboard the plane, a Syrian family of six from Harasta have managed to survive the civil war at home and hope to pass through Belarus and Poland en route to Sweden. The action starts about a year before the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, when migrants from war-torn countries like Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were encouraged by Lukashenko to use Belarus as a gateway to Poland and the EU. Altogether, these braided strands make for a bracing, impassioned skein of humanist cinema, old-school in technique but right up to the moment in terms of its subject matter. Some of these volunteers are doctors or lawyers, but others are activists opposed to the right-wing regime of President Andrzej Duda - people putting their own safety at risk but also sometimes fracturing the resistance with infighting over strategies. Not long after the section featuring these soldiers and their community, the frame pulls back further to encompass some of their compatriots who are trying to help the refugees. But Holland cunningly digs a little deeper here to explore the psyches of characters who might just be faceless heavies in other stories - like the Polish border guards, shown encouraged by an officer giving a “morale” talk to think of migrants as weapons sent across the border by Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. On the news and in cinema, there has been no shortage of footage and re-enactments of the agonies suffered every day by migrants and refugees. There is a moment where a Pole, a minor character in the story, refuses to look at a video on a friend’s phone showing a border guard beating a migrant Holland’s film implicitly confronts everyone - and that would be most of us - who has ever switched off or turned away from watching yet another deplorable act of state-sponsored violence. Screenwriters: Maciej Pisuk, Gabriela Lazarkiewicz-Sieczko, Agnieszka HollandĪlthough the violence shown isn’t gratuitous, the suffering in Green Border (Zielona granica) is painfully palpable. Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)Ĭast: Jalal Altawil, Maja Ostaszewska, Behi Djanati Atai, Mohamad Al Rashi, Dalia Naous, Tomasz Wlosok, Malwina Bussĭirectors: Agnieszka Holland, in collaboration with Kamila Tarabura and Katarzyna Warzecha
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |