ZIELONA GRANICA (GREEN BORDER)
Venice 80 – Competition
Poland/France/Czech Republic/Belgium2023 Direction Agnieszka Holland translators Jalal Altawil, Maya Ostaszewska, Tomasz Wlosok, Behi Janati Atai, Mohamad Al Rashi, Dahlia Naus. Duration 152′
Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, the serious humanitarian and political crisis that the director described had already begun (and is still ongoing). Agnieszka Holland V green border (Zelena Border), in competition at the 80th Venice Film Festival: let’s talk about the situation on the “green border”, between Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko and Poland far-right Mateusz Morawiecki. From one, migrants from Africa and the Middle East try to enter the other, but at the border they are brutally rejected by the Polish government, which erected a 186 km wall to block the entrances. This scenario was also recently discussed Kasia Smutnyak in documentary (coming soon) Moore. And it was only a matter of time before Agnieszka Holland did it: after all, the Polish director, in addition to numerous and appreciated collaborations with Anglo-American cinema and television (she directed, among others, Leonardo DiCaprio and David Thewlis in the 1995 film Poets from hellbut also episodes of such series as Wire, House of Cards, Cold Case AND Murder), for decades told the darkest pages of the history of the Old Continent, such as the crimes of the Nazis and World War II in Europe Europe (1990) and In the dark (2011), Oscar nominees. green border in particular, we will talk about some figures: the activist Yulia, the young border guard Yana and the Syrian family. “We live in a world where great imagination and courage are needed to face all the challenges of our time,” Holland said. “The social media revolution and artificial intelligence have made it increasingly difficult for us to hear authentic voices. In my opinion, there is no point in making art if you do not fight for these voices, if you do not fight to ask questions about important, painful, sometimes insoluble problems that present us with a dramatic choice. This is exactly the situation on the border between Poland and Belarus.”