VENICE: After the media was denied entry to migrants desperately making an attempt to cross the Polish-Belarus border, director Agnieszka Holland determined to step in and make a wrenching film about their plight.
Green Border, which premiered on the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, tells the story of refugees, charity employees, activists and border guards, whose lives intersect within the chilly, swampy forests between the 2 east European international locations.
Migrants began flocking to the border in 2021, after Belarus, an in depth Russian ally, opened journey businesses within the Middle East providing a brand new unofficial route into Europe — a transfer the European Union mentioned was designed to create a disaster.
Poland refused to allow them to cross, leaving a whole lot stranded in a freezing no-man’s land, and briefly imposed an exclusion zone, forbidding reporters and human rights teams from approaching the world to see what was going on.
“It was unimaginable for the documentary makers and the journalists to go there, however we are able to re-create and do one thing that I understand how to do, make a fictional movie about occasions that are going on proper now,” Holland mentioned.
“We needed to attempt to seize it in all (its) potential complexity and provides justice and a voice to those that have been silenced and are unvoiced,” she added.
Her black-and-white movie reveals a household from Syria and a lady from Afghanistan thrown again and ahead throughout the border by brutal guards detached to their struggling, as activists wrestle to attempt to carry them to security.
Published in Dawn, September sixth, 2023
