At a time when refugees are vilified by populists, Agnieszka Holland delivers the perfect rebuttal to that nasty, inhumane mode of thinking. Green Border is a tough watch as it follows a small band of Syrians, Africans and Afghans shunted back and forth between Belarus and Poland, human chess pieces in European politics who are left to suffer in the freezing forests of Eastern Europe. But there’s hope here, too: in the younger Europeans who reject the barbarity of their elders, and in the richly-drawn migrants themselves, some of whom are played by actual refugees. It’s a bleak but brilliant piece of humanist filmmaking.
