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Green BorderImage: Kino Lorber

Green Border, the latest from master Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, is nothing short of a call to direct action. The film provides a nuanced, if at times frankly brutal, account of the treacherous conditions migrants face on the Polish-Belarusian border, which are either exacerbated or assuaged...

As the international refugee crisis was wobbling past its tipping point in late 2021, a small patch of no-man’s-land between two Eastern European nations was turning into a hot spot. Migrants who were fleeing turmoil in the Middle East and parts of Africa had been told that they could find a way into Europe via Belarus. The rumors were that the country’s president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, was touting easily accessible tourist visas as a safer alternative than trying to make the arduous, dangerous journey by boat. Once there, they...

Agnieszka Holland’s filmography will be celebrated this June thanks to the Museum of the Moving Image and the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

MoMI will host a retrospective featuring nine of Holland’s most beloved films leading up to the release of her latest “Green Border.” The nine features include highlights “Europa Europa” on and “The Secret Garden,” which both will screen in 35mm with Holland in attendance on June 20 and 21.

The retrospective will take place from June 7 through 21 and serve as a toast to Holland’s “undimmed ability to depict historical trauma and human struggle with sensitivity and compassion” across her 60 years in filmmaking, per the official press statement.

The retrospective will feature her initial work made in Poland, including “Provincial Actors,” “Fever,” and “A Woman Alone,” along with Holland’s 1990s art house features “Europa Europa” and “The Secret Garden,” and depictions of present-day political resistance like “Spoor” and “In Darkness.

"Helping is not illegal." Kino Lorber has revealed an official US trailer for an urgent, acclaimed Polish film titled Green Border, the latest from the masterful Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland. This premiered at last year's 2023 Venice Film Festival in the fall, where it won a Special Jury Prize at the end. Thirty years after Europa Europa, three-time Oscar nominee Agnieszka Holland brings a masterful eye for realism and deep compassion to this blistering critique of a humanitarian calamity that continues to unfold. The B&w film follows family of refugees from Syria, an English teacher from Afghanistan, and a border guard, who all meet on the Polish-Belarusian border during the most recent humanitarian crisis in Belarus. Green Border is a poignant and essential work of cinema that opens our eyes and speaks to the heart, challenging viewers to reflect on the moral choices that fall to ordinary people every day. Yes it's harrowing and unforgettable.

The medium is the message in Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border, a piece of political cinema so freshly ripped from the headlines that you can still feel the jagged edges. Holland shot the film, which chronicles the wide ripple effects of a 2021 surge of asylum seekers along the Polish-Belarusian border, in just 23 days in March of this year and had it ready for fall festivals mere months later. In the end, her sense of propulsive, incandescent outrage is both the project’s reason for existence and its strongest attribute.

Holland, directing in collaboration with Kamila Tarabura and Katarzyna Warzecha, resists the impulse for urgency to trump all aesthetic considerations. Green Border moves beyond documentary-style realism as a shorthand for authenticity, and it’s at its most gut-wrenching when Tomek Naumiuk’s agile camerawork captures bodies in frequent, frightening motion, as well as the illusory sense of security that those bodies feel in moments of rest.

Before the New York Film Festival premiere of her latest opus, Green Border, legendary director Agnieszka Holland wished everyone a good screening: “I would tell you to enjoy the film, but that would not be appropriate.”

It was an apt warning for the harrowing, exquisite film that unfolded. Green Border focuses on the treatment of migrants trying to cross from Belarus to Poland so they can find asylum in the European Union. As a result, Holland is now on the shit list of nearly every high-ranking Polish politician, from the president to the Minister of Science and Higher Education. What a shame they’re so blinded by their station that they can’t even appreciate magnificent works of art. Green Border is a riveting, finely crafted, deeply human accounting of the atrocities we make permissible in the name of nationalism.

The film is told in several parts that focus on...

The Polish film Green Border had already courted plenty of international controversy by the time the drama premiered at the New York Film Festival this week. After its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in August, where it won the Special Jury Prize, the film — which depicts the horrific conditions faced by migrants attempting to cross from Belarus into Poland — has broken box office records in its home country despite a government-approved warning video before the movie downplaying its critique of the Polish government’s handling of the border crisis.

“I’ve become the biggest threat to Polish national security,” said director Agnieszka Holland during a Q&a following the film’s Thursday night screening in which the filmmaker was joined by cinematographer Tomasz Naumiuk and actresses Behi Djanati-Atai and Joely Mbundu. Just before the Venice premiere, both the Polish justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro and president Andrzej Duda compared...

It’s a strange time for Agnieszka Holland. Green Border, the new film from the acclaimed Polish director — a three-time Oscar nominee — just celebrated the best opening for a Polish movie in cinemas this year with 137,000 admissions over its first weekend, according to local distributor Kino Świat. It’s particularly impressive given that the film, a black-and-white drama depicting the real-life plight of refugees stranded on the natural border between Poland and Belarus, can be a rough watch.

In late 2021, thousands of refugees from the Middle East and Africa were lured to the Polish border by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who cynically engineered a geopolitical crisis, promising migrants easy passage over the Polish border into the European Union. But the Polish government refused to let them in, leaving families stranded and starving in the swampy, treacherous forests between the two countries. Holland’s film intertwines the perspectives of the stranded refugees,...

If cinema is an empathy machine, to paraphrase the late Roger Ebert, then Agnieszka Holland’s new film is one precision-tooled specimen.

This profoundly moving, flawlessly executed multi-strand drama, shot in stark black and white, tracks refugees from various nations in 2021 trying to cross the border from Belarus into Poland. With inevitably tragic consequences, they become pawns in a gruesome game of “pass the parcel” between guards on both sides of the title’s green border, the dividing line between European Union member Poland and Russia ally Belarus.

Although the violence shown isn’t gratuitous, the suffering in Green Border (Zielona granica) is painfully palpable. 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...

Venice film festival: Agnieszka Holland’s brutal and timely drama shines a dark spotlight on the horrors faced by refugees in the exclusion zone between Poland and Belarus

At 74, Polish film-maker Agnieszka Holland has lost none of her passion – or compassion – and this brutal, angry, gruelling drama, in sombre black and white, is recognisably the work of that director who made Europa Europa in 1990. It is about the “green border” exclusion zone between Poland and Belarus, now the location for an apparently unending ordeal for refugees.

With sly malice, Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko has in recent years permitted the admission of refugees, cynically encouraging their hope of getting easily from there on foot across the border into Poland and the EU via the Białowieża Forest – but only as a way of punishing and undermining the European Union for its anti-Belarus sanctions. He has effectively weaponised these desperate souls and the...

While you’re still in the vice-like grip of its multilevel narrative it may not feel like it, but a film like Agnieszka Holland’s bruisingly powerful new refugee drama ultimately comes from a place of optimism. It is optimistic to expect and to nurture a reaction of potentially motivating outrage, when you portray the brutality of which human individuals, at the behest of human institutions, are capable. It is optimistic to believe that, faced with extraordinary cruelty, a viewer’s ordinary decency will be compelled to rise and rebel. “Green Border” is a heart-in-mouth thriller set on the Polish-Belarusian border that wraps its social critique in the razor wire of punchy, intelligent cinematic craft in order to elicit precisely such emotions. If we can feel the horror, perhaps there is hope.

It is 2021 and a Syrian family are fleeing Isis and their ravaged hometown of Harasta on an airplane bound for Belarus.

Editor’s Note: This review was published during the 2023 Venice Film Festival. Kino Lorber releases “Green Border” in select theaters Friday, June 21, 2024.

If you’ve seen “Europa Europa,” the real-life story of a Jewish boy who escapes a Nazi concentration camp and joins the German army, you’ll know that the Polish director Agnieszka Holland knows how to make films about people wriggling their way through life. Her latest film, which is in competition at Venice, tells several interlinked stories in and around the swampy forest border region between Poland and Belarus. We meet border guards, activists, and refugees themselves. Despite biting off a bit more than it can chew, it’s an affecting introduction to a little-known crisis and the latest case of a master filmmaker showing us they can still do it.

Six weeks out of a national election in which Poland’s hard-right government is expected to extend its grip on power,...

Berlin-based sales agency Films Boutique has closed multiple territory deals on Agnieszka Holland’s “The Green Border,” which just completed principal photography in Poland.

The film has been sold to Condor (France), September Films (Benelux), Movies Inspired (Italy), Leopardo Filmes (Portugal), McF Megacom (former Yugoslavia), Kino Swiat (Poland) and Aqs (Czech Rep./Slovakia).

“The Green Border” tells the story of a family of Syrian refugees, a solitary English teacher from Afghanistan and a young border guard, all of whom meet on the Polish-Belarusian border during the most recent humanitarian crisis triggered by Belarus’ president Alexander Lukashenko, who opened the country’s doors to migrants as a back door to enter the EU.

The screenplay, penned by Holland, Gabriela Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko and Maciej Pisuk, is inspired by real events. Research for the film included hundreds of hours of document analysis, interviews with refugees, border guards, borderland residents, activists and experts.

A co-production between Poland,...

Rolling off a successful collaboration on “Charlatan,” Films Boutique has boarded Agnieszka Holland’s next film “The Green Border,” which just completed principal photography in Poland.

Now in post production, “The Green Border” tells the fateful story of a family of Syrian refugees, a solitary English teacher from Afghanistan and a young border guard, all of whom meet on the Polish-Belarusian border during the most recent humanitarian crisis triggered by President Lukaschenko opening doors to migrants in Belarus as a back door to enter the EU.

The screenplay, penned by Holland, Gabriela Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko and Maciej Pisuk, is inspired by real events. Research for the film included hundreds of hours of document analysis, interviews with refugees, border guards, borderland residents, activists and experts.

A co-production between Poland, France, Belgium and the Czech Republic, “The Green Border” is produced by Marcin Wierzchosławski (Metro Films), Fred Bernstein (Astute Films) and Holland. Co-producers are Maria Blicharska,...

As Hollywood events return to full force in New York and Los Angeles amid the coronavirus pandemic, here’s a look at this week’s biggest premieres, parties and openings, including red carpets for Top Gun: Maverick, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Girls5Eva and The Staircase.

Girls5Eva season two premiere

Peacock hosted a season two celebration with stars Sara Bareilles, Paula Pell, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Busy Philipps and producer Tina Fey on Sunday at NYC’s Roxy Hotel.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness world premiere

Benedict Cumberbatch, Elizabeth Olsen, Benedict Wong, Rachel McAdams, Xochitl Gomez and director Sam Raimi debuted the highly anticipated sequel at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on Monday.

The Staircase premiere

Also on Monday night, Colin Firth gathered with co-stars Sophie Turner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Parker Posey, Patrick Schwarzenegger and Michael Stuhlbarg for the premiere of HBO Max series The Staircase, held at MoMa.