Director: Agnieszka Holland

Stars: Jalal Altawil, Maja Ostaszewska, Behi Djanati Atai, Mohamad Al Rashi, Tomasz Włosok

Skilfully related from multiple perspectives, veteran Polish director Holland’s picture is a harrowing depiction of the refugee experience as well as a heartfelt plea for humanity. It begins in 2021 on a plane bound to Belarus where we meet a Syrian family fleeing ISIS. They are planning to make their way to Sweden to see relatives. The mother Amina (Naous) tells her fellow passenger, Afghan refugee Leia (Atia) that a flight is far safer than trying to enter the EU by sea. However, it emerges that Belarusian dictator Lukashenko is using the refugees as political pawns, dumping them on the Polish border to provoke the EU. On arriving at the border, Amina’s family and their fellow refugees are treated appallingly by the guards, who have received lectures dehumanizing the new arrivals by their superiors. Holland also profiles one of the border guards Jan (Włosok). Jan has a pregnant wife Kasia (Buss) who is initially in denial about her husband’s activities. Meanwhile, a recently widowed psychiatrist Julia (Ostaszewska), after witnessing the treatment of the refugees first hand, decides to join an activist cell headed up by two bickering sisters. Rendered in crisp black and white this is a nuanced and admirably even-handed study, which nonetheless features some horrifying imagery, in particular a sequence where border guards hurl a pregnant black woman over a barbed wire fence back into Belarus. It’s also a tentatively hopeful film about bearing witness that engenders feelings of common humanity along with a call to action.

David Willoughby

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