Green Border

Green Border (Zielona granica, 2023) is Agnieszka Holland's drama you can watch online on iFILM. The swampy forests along the Poland–Belarus frontier, autumn 2021. People fleeing war are lured here by promises of an easy crossing into the EU — then trapped between two armies that don't want them.

The film moves between several lives. A Syrian family travelling with kids and an elderly grandfather. An English teacher from Afghanistan, on her own. Jan, a young border guard ordered to shove exhausted strangers back over the razor wire. And Julia (Maja Ostaszewska), a small-town therapist who drifts almost by accident into activism. Their paths cross in a strip of woodland sealed off from journalists and medics alike.

Holland shot it in stark black and white, with almost no score, closer to frontline reportage than melodrama. It took the Special Jury Prize at Venice and enraged Poland's government, whose ministers branded it slander before anyone had seen a frame. Hard, deliberately uncomfortable cinema for viewers who want the crisis without a safe distance. Stream Green Border (2023) online on iFILM.