Agnieszka Holland’s politically-charged new film Green Border, offers a humanising perspective on the plight of Asian and African refugees trying to enter the European Union via the Polish–Belarusian border. The refugees suffer inhumane experiences by both the Polish and Belarusian border guards, who pass them back and forth as though they’re hot potatoes. The Poles see them as Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s bullets, after he threatened to flood the EU with drugs and immigrants.

Green Border’s black and white cinematography is a striking albeit natural choice for the political drama, that grounds it in reality. Told across a series of chapters, the story explores the crisis from the points of view of the refugees, the border guards, activists and even a psychotherapist.

Holland has always shown herself to be a filmmaker of conscience, exploring troubling, even difficult stories that are underpinned by her Holocaust films, Angry Harvest (1985), Europa Europa (1990) and In Darkness (2011). The miniseries Burning Bush (2013) told the story of the Czech struggle for liberation from Soviet rule, and more recently, Charlatan (2020), was based on the true story of infamous Czech healer Jan Mikolášek, who, with his uncanny knack for urinary diagnosis, won favour and fortune by treating prominent Nazi and Communist figures. Holland has also directed episodes of David Simon’s HBO series, The Wire (2002-2008), a crime drama that took an ambitious panoramic view of the Baltimore City drug trade across its five seasons, by threading together the streets, port, city council, schools, law enforcement and the media.

When I connected with Holland virtually, who was delayed due to a technical hitch, she was her usual thoughtful and engaged self. Despite the despair she feels about the troubling events across the world, especially in her native Poland and in European politics, our conversation reveals her hope for the future. Interviewing Holland for the third time in the last 10 years, it occurs to me that she takes her subjects seriously yet doesn’t appear to do the same with herself. From specific comments and the tone of her voice, I’ve picked up on her humorous nature that can be hidden behind her concentrated effort in interviews.

Green Border has incurred the wrath of the right wing, but one suspects that she’s happy to provoke such a reaction if it means honouring her moral integrity as an artist. She doesn’t hold back from sharing her honest thoughts about the corruption of European politics and the weaponisation of refugees.

Click here in order to read our interview with Agnieszka three years ago.

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Paul Risker – A good place to start is to ask you about the motivation behind Green Border?

Agnieszka Holland – The motivation is maybe that I like finding trouble. Maybe I felt I had to make the film because of the situation on the Polish border in the summer of 2021, which confirmed all my fears about the migration issue and the way it’s shaping Europe and our world. This is not only by dictators like [Vladimir] Putin and [Alexander] Lukashenko, but also by the European politicians that are spreading fear and hate in order to hold onto power.

The refugees are not coming from nowhere, and they’re not the product of Lukashenko or Putin – they are fleeing places in the Middle East and Africa that they’re unable to live in. So, the problem will not stop with our cruelty. Our logic is the belief they will be discouraged by our violence and dehumanisation of them. This violence and dehumanisation in Europe is escalating faster than I expected. It changes the agendas of democratic parties and politicians, who have started speaking exactly the same language as nationalistic and extreme-right politicians.

We are in a situation like we were in the 1930s and the logical consequence will be to shoot the refugees on our borders. The Polish Democratic government just gave their soldiers permission to shoot the refugees if they feel they must, without risk of investigation or punishment. There’s already a large majority of people in the country who agree that we have to shoot those people [refugees] because they are not people, they are weapons.

I wanted to humanise through the human perspective and to give a face and voice to those deprived of their identity. They are changed into these stereotypes, like pedophiles, terrorists, rapists and Putin’s weapons. I wanted to show the real people behind these stereotypes.

PR – It’s the clichéd question, why can’t we learn from history?

AH – We are blind to the lessons. Several years after the Second World War and the Holocaust ended, this experience of an absence of humanity acted as a kind of functioning vaccine. The European Union was created from a feeling that we cannot survive if we’re not immune to racism and nationalism and hate towards others. But that vaccine is not working anymore; it has evaporated. It started to evaporate completely around September 11 [2001], and since then, Europe and the United States are more accepting of the passionate response to the problem.

So, I’m quite pessimistic, and I’ve been talking about this for many years. When I was doing my Holocaust movies, I was talking about how we don’t want to see the mechanisms which led to fascism, and we are now on a similar path. I screened Green Border first in Poland and then several other countries, and the reaction was very emotional. Audiences are taken by the story and the message, and by the film itself, but it will not change the world. It will only change some souls.

If you can see the path the future is taking, I feel there’s a duty to speak about it and humanise those that are deprived by hateful propaganda. But as long as, for many politicians, the situation is reduced to political goals, they will not stop initiating hate and using it as an important political weapon.

PR – The way politics weaponises religion, migration and the human body makes it difficult to be optimistic about the future. Not only that, but the way in which different forms of violence and abuse are legalised is a cause for concern.

AH – Yes, but it means the only optimism I have is that things will become better, but first, it will be much worse. So, we need another dose of the vaccine. I don’t know how far and for how long we have to fall before we understand that we have only one planet for everybody and if we are not respecting people’s rights, then our rights will quickly not be respected either. Israel and Gaza, and Hamas, are examples of the lack of communication and respect for one another.

PR – Picking up on your point about exerting influence on the audience, change is a trickle effect. We rely on art, especially cinema, as an empathy machine, to challenge the mainstream news media and the political infrastructure to create this incremental change.

AH – Well, I don’t regret doing it. I just don’t have the illusion that I can change more than some people’s minds, but after it was released in Poland, the film somehow paradoxically helped the Democrats win a slight percentage – I don’t know how many votes because of the reaction to the film from the hate campaign. So, I was hoping they would at least keep some promises, but that hope has evaporated, and the refugees are living in more tragic situations.

PR – Why did you choose to shoot the film in black and white, instead of colour?

AH – There were many reasons why I chose black and white. The first is that I like black and white. With my cinematographer [Tomasz Naumiuk], we were looking for a style that would have both the rawness of a documentary and a metaphorical dimension, as well as a timelessness of what’s going on in these places.

When I was talking to the local people [who’d seen the film], they had the impression that they had been transferred to the past. From their houses in the forest, they felt they were seeing the images and meeting characters from the Second World War. These parallels are now more and more present.

PR – Green Border is a narrative drama based on real life experiences of the refugees and the border guards. How did you safeguard the reality of the drama to ensure it remained authentic and truthful?

AH – We had a very good researcher who was looking through printed and video sources. The crisis was pretty well covered from the beginning, and we met with activists and local people who could tell us their stories and share their perspectives. I was watching many unofficial or somehow underground recordings of the refugees and their stories, as well as meeting with several refugees who I was able to speak to directly. We were also successful in meeting some border guards who were willing to share their experiences because they’d been traumatised, and they wanted to help, anonymously, of course, and there were other sources.

I’m not exaggerating the characters in the film. Everything that happens, even the most extreme behaviour of the border guards, has at least two independent sources. We not only wanted to have our asses covered, but we were afraid we’d become the anti-propaganda to certain propaganda. We wanted to restrain ourselves and to not go further than the truth.

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Green Border was released in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, June 21st.

Agnieszka Holland is pictured both at the top and in the middle of this interview.

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