The Green Border (2023) is a feature film about the drama of refugees attempting to cross the Belarusian-Polish border into the European Union and safety.
It has already won several international awards, including the Special Jury Prize at the 80th Venice Film Festival.
The film has received mostly positive reviews from critics with an approval rating of 94% on the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes - based on 84 reviews. Rotten Tomatoes' summary review states:
"With unyielding clarity, Green Border renders a compassionate portrait of the unmerciful landscape that flanks the Polish-Belarusian border."[26] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 90 out of 100, based on 29 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
The film has divided Polish public and media opinion along today's culture war lines, garnering praise from liberal left media such as Gazeta Wyborcza and criticism from the nationalist pro-PiS SieciPrawdy who called it a "disgrace" and a "knife in the back for Poland's Border Guard" for its criticism of Poland's humanitarian response to the refugee crisis.
Other award winners at this year's Gdynia Film Festival included:
Kamila Tarabura for her film "Rzeczy niezbędne" ["Essentials"] and its leading actor Katarzyna Warnke and the makers of "Dziewczyna z igłą" ["The Girl With The Needle"], directed by Magnus von Horn (a Swedish director working in Poland) and produced by Malene Blenkov and Mariusz Włodarski.
Sources: Wyborcza.pl, SieciPrawdy, Rotten Tomatoes
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