General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20268 min read

Green Border

Green Border (Polish: Zielona granica) is a 2023 black-and-white drama directed by Agnieszka Holland about refugees trapped in the forested border zone between Belarus and Poland, who are pushed back and forth between the two countries as Poland and the European Union block their entry¹^•². It won the Special Jury Prize at the 80th Venice International Film Festival and became the subject of an unusually public denunciation by Poland's ruling party weeks before a parliamentary election that removed that party from power³^•⁴.

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Zielona granica¹
Format	Drama, 152 min, 2023, shot in black and white¹^•⁵
Director and screenplay	Agnieszka Holland; screenplay by Maciej Pisuk, Gabriela Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko, and Holland⁶
Leading cast	Jalal Altawil (Bashir), Maja Ostaszewska (Julia), Behi Djanati Ataï (Leïla), Tomasz Włosok (Jan)⁶^•⁵
Production	Metro Lato (Poland) with Blick Productions (France), Marlene Film Production (Czech Republic), and Beluga Tree (Belgium); Czech Television a co-producer¹^•³
Top award	Special Jury Prize, 80th Venice International Film Festival, 9 September 2023³
Critical reception	Metascore 90, "Universal Acclaim"; 94% on the Tomatometer⁷^•⁵
US release	Limited theatrical release 21 June 2024, distributed by Kino Lorber; US gross $94.1K⁵

Spoilers

Story and form

The film begins in late 2021 aboard a flight to Minsk, where refugees from the Middle East and Africa, including a Syrian family led by Bashir and an Afghan woman named Leïla, believe a propaganda promise that the route through Belarus is "a gift from god" toward the European Union⁶^•¹³^•¹⁴. Once they enter Poland through the swamps and forests, Polish border guards arrest them and, as the film depicts it, kick them back across the wire fence into Belarus¹⁴.

Chapter structure. Holland and cinematographer Tomasz Naumiuk unfold the story in chapters, widening from the Syrian family to other refugees, to Polish border guards including the young Jan, and to activists including Julia, a psychotherapist living near the border who moves from comfortable inaction to activism after the two storylines converge¹³^•⁵. In one of the film's most discussed devices, refugees record statements for activists on a phone camera; lines such as "I don't even know if I'm human anymore" register their dehumanization on screen¹³.

Holland chose black and white deliberately. "I thought that black and white makes the relationship to history very strong," she told Film Comment, linking the treatment of today's refugees to Europe's past⁴.

Background: the border crisis

The film takes its name from the so-called "green border", the forests and swamps along the roughly 400-kilometer boundary between Poland and Belarus that form a stretch of the EU's external frontier⁸. Since 2021, EU authorities have accused Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of weaponizing migration by luring people from the Middle East and Africa to his country with the promise of an easier entry into the bloc than the Mediterranean routes⁸. Migrants crossing into Poland were pushed back to Belarus, often without being allowed to apply for international protection, contrary to Polish, EU, and international law according to the Asylum Information Database, and were left without access to material reception conditions or medical assistance⁹.

Holland traced her decision to make the film to two moments. The first was the 2015 migration crisis, in which 1.3 million people, mainly Syrian, requested asylum in Europe; she later said she realized "how easy it is to break the laws protecting human rights which we are so proud of, and become susceptible to external blackmail"¹⁰. The second was Poland's sealing off of a large tract of forest as a no man's land patrolled by troops, and a statement by Deputy Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński that the Americans lost the war in Vietnam because they allowed the media in. "It was some kind of anger, you know, that triggered my decision to make the film. But I also felt I had a duty to do so," she said¹⁰. In a German interview she pointed to an earlier symbolic episode, the standoff at the village of Usnarz Górny, where a group of Afghan refugees was stranded between Belarusian soldiers on one side and Polish soldiers on the other¹¹.

The script was written quickly once the Polish-Belarusian crisis broke out. "We decided to make the film immediately when the Polish-Belarusian border crisis broke out and wrote the screenplay in three months," Holland told the Dutch magazine Cineville¹².

Venice and the political response in Poland

At the 80th Venice International Film Festival the jury, presided by Damien Chazelle, awarded Green Border the Special Jury Prize at the closing ceremony on 9 September 2023; Holland accepted it accompanied by one of her co-directors, Katarzyna Warzecha³. The film also received several non-statutory awards at Venice: the ARCA CinemaGiovani Award, the Premio CinemaSarà from Cineteca Italiana di Milano, the Green Drop Award from Green Cross Italia, the Cinema for UNICEF Award, the "Sorriso Diverso Venezia Award" for Best Foreign Film, and the UNIMED Prize for cultural diversity¹^•³. It then played Toronto, where it had its North American premiere¹⁵.

Official condemnation. The premiere in Poland on 22 September 2023 was met with denunciation from the highest levels of government². Kaczyński, Poland's most powerful politician, called a news conference that Friday to attack the film, accusing it of defaming Poland; most officials criticizing it acknowledged not having seen it². Holland told Film Comment that the prime minister and the head of the ruling Law and Justice party called the film a collection of lies, shameful, and disgusting on social media, and that the minister of justice compared her to Josef Goebbels. She described the attacks as unprecedented, "even compared to Communist times," and said the controversy aroused the curiosity of audiences opposed to the government, who went to theaters in large numbers⁴. Right-wing groups called for a boycott before release¹⁵, while public media attacked the film alongside public demonstrations of support, including an "Agnieszka Poland" t-shirt¹⁶.

The film went on general release in Poland about a month before the state election that ousted the right-wing politicians who had condemned it¹⁰. Holland said the film played a part in mobilizing people to vote against the ruling party; Time reported that it became a box-office hit in Poland and that the election soon removed Zbigniew Ziobro and other right-wing politicians who had decried it⁴^•¹⁷.

Reception and awards

Critics received the film with near-unanimous acclaim at Venice. Metacritic recorded a metascore of 90 from 29 reviews, 28 positive and 1 mixed, and none negative⁷. The Hollywood Reporter's Leslie Felperin called it a "profoundly moving, flawlessly executed" work and, invoking Roger Ebert's phrase, "one precision-tooled specimen" of cinema as an empathy machine⁷^•¹⁵. Justin Chang wrote in The New Yorker that the film is "a work of devastating intelligence, striking visual clarity, and extraordinarily propulsive anger"⁷. Reviews were not uniformly positive: a Venice Review Daily critic found the character development predictable and the mosaic narrative distancing¹⁸, and the FNE FIPRESCI critics poll at the festival ranked it well down the list of competition titles¹⁹.

Audiences responded strongly. At the 53rd International Film Festival Rotterdam, which ran 25 January to 4 February 2024, Green Border won the audience award²⁰. It also screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the Zurich Film Festival, and the Busan International Film Festival³, and was selected in the Venice competition record of the Biennale's archive²¹.

Runtime and release discrepancies

Metro Films and the Mannheim-Heidelberg festival listing give the running time as 152 minutes¹^•²², while Rotten Tomatoes lists a 2h 27m (147-minute) cut for the 2024 US release, and a Venice dispatch mentioned a 147-minute runtime⁵^•¹⁴. A Venice daily review referred to a "150-plus-minute" film, and Kino Świat markets the film in Poland under the title "The Green Border"¹⁸^•²³.

The border crisis after the film

The situation the film dramatizes has continued to develop. A temporary restriction on the right to submit an application for international protection at the Polish-Belarusian border has been in force since 27 March 2025, introduced by a Regulation of the Council of Ministers under Article 33a(5) of Poland's 2003 act on granting protection to foreigners, and was extended by regulation for another 60 days from 21 January 2026²⁴. The Associated Press reported in September 2026 that the policy, presented as a temporary emergency measure against what Poland saw as a destabilization push by Russia and Belarus, had remained in force for 18 months, and that Poland was urging the 27-nation bloc to allow similar temporary suspensions during episodes of "instrumentalized" mass migration, which rights advocates warn could violate international law⁸. Le Monde reported that the May 2025 extension by parliament, ten days before a second round of voting, drew criticism as purely electoral, and described officials framing the border situation as part of a "hybrid war" waged by Russia and Belarus to destabilize Warsaw²⁵.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2023 and 2024 › Titles A to G

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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