by Julian Wood
Worth: $18.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Jalal Altawil, Maja Ostaszewska, Behi Djanati Atai, Mohamad Al Rashi, Dalia Naous, Tomasz Włosok
Intro:
... timely and excoriating drama ...
Borders, what are they? Lines on a map. Yet, for some unlucky or displaced people, they can be a matter of life and death. And, of course, a great deal of state and private technology and military force goes into enforcing these lines. In an era of increased global migration from war zones and climate catastrophes, the contradictions are only going to sharpen.
All this is the assumed background knowledge to veteran director Agnieszka Holland’s timely and excoriating drama about the human face of all this. Shot in artful black and white and in a semi-documentary style, the film also brings all the emotional language of drama to make us experience the anguish of these human flows.
Most of the action takes place either side of the Polish/Belarus border. Poland, of course, is now in the EU, and for the Syrian refugee families depicted here, it represents a gateway to other European countries. The family that Holland focuses upon is from Syria and they hope to settle eventually in Sweden. Amina (Dalia Naous) has two children and her dad to look after. With increasing desperation, she tries to keep everyone together and shield them all from the cold and the hunger. On top of those depredations, they have to face the arbitrary acts of cruelty from the calloused and often openly-racist border guards. Every time they manage to get across the border, the guards gleefully load them onto trucks and ‘re-export’ back to Belarus. And, each time it gets more brutal and harder to come back from.
The family comes across an Afghani woman called Leila (Behi Dianati Atai), who has money (useful for bribing officials) and knowledge of the law. Not that her efforts stand much chance against the armed guards and the continuing repression. As the end captions tell us, there are still tens of thousands of displaced people in this region, and behind each one of those ‘statistics’, we know there is a heartrending story.
Holland brings all her skill to put us in the refuges’ shoes. However, she also sketches in the different positions and logics for the various players. This is important in helping her still-cogent film rise above mere polemic. We glimpse the lives of the soldiers, for example, but she also shows that there are small groups of Polish activists who go out of their way to shelter the refugees. Even so, the lingering aftertaste of the film is one of pity and sadness.
