Venice Prize-winning film Green Border is a heartbreaking dramatisation of the very real refugee crisis on the Belarus-Poland border

In May 2021, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko retaliated against European-Union-imposed sanctions on his dictatorship by facilitating tourist visas for Middle Eastern and African asylum seekers.

Rather than doing it out of a genuine desire to rehome those fleeing persecution, Lukashenko was using asylum seekers as political pawns. They'd been sold lies about Belarus being an easy gateway into the EU countries of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. Once they arrived in Belarus, Lukashenko's government would facilitate their entry into the EU, only for those countries to push them back into Belarus.

The ensuing Belarus-Poland refugee border crisis is the subject of clear-eyed movie Green Border, from Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland.

The ancient Białowieża Forest straddling the Belarus-Poland border — the infamous green border — is a wildlife enthusiast's dream. The designated UNESCO World Heritage Site is home to one of the last old-growth forests in Europe, some 800 European bisons and rare birds.

For the thousands of asylum seekers who cross this border in search of a safe refuge, it's purgatory. They are met by impenetrable thickets of dense forest land and boggy marshlands so dangerous, unsuspecting people have drowned in them.

Holland's decision to shoot the forest from overhead in its lush greenery before switching to black and white — a gloomy pall that the entire film is cast in — underlines how treacherous life is when you have the simple misfortune of being born in a certain place at a certain time.

The film starts in the safe confines of a plane, where a Syrian family of six, including a newborn, are travelling to Minsk, Belarus. Accompanying them is someone who will become a companion in their search for asylum, the middle-aged Afghan English teacher Leila from Kabul. They're none the wiser as to the fate that awaits them, comforted by the knowledge that their relative has arranged safe passage for them from Minsk to Malmo, Sweden.

Things start to go awry at the Belarus-Poland border. Unscrupulous people smugglers unceremoniously banish them past barbed-wire fences into Polish forest land, without any food or supplies, in weather conditions ranging from heavy rainfall to sub-zero temperatures.

From there, border guards on both sides play an inhumane game of ping pong with them and other asylum seekers in the same predicament (dead or alive) — violently and illegally tossing them back into Belarus, then back into Poland, and back again into Belarus. And so forth. All the while, they continue to have no access to food, water or shelter.

The mind-numbing drudgery and cruelty of this pointless political exercise time and time again is underscored by Holland's uncompromising, matter-of-fact storytelling. We see the sheer mental and physical toll this exacts on increasingly desperate asylum seekers who, at best, are severely malnourished and injured and, at worst, dead from wholly preventable ailments.

Many of the asylum seekers' testimonies in the film are a composite of the experiences of their real-life counterparts, often from Syria, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Somalia and Eritrea.

Interspersed among these portrayals of extreme suffering are viewpoints of Polish people on opposing sides of this human rights crisis.

There's Jan, an introspective border security guard who embodies the banality of evil; he hasn't fully bought into the state propaganda designed to dehumanise the asylum seekers, which finds its real-world parallel in comments made by Polish Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro, who compared Green Border to Nazi propaganda. We see the mental gymnastics he has to perform in order to justify what he does. But he continues to do it nonetheless, numbing the cognitive dissonance with alcohol.

Then there's a group of guerilla-like human rights activists who venture into the exclusion zone to offer medical assistance, supplies and legal advice to the embattled asylum seekers.

We're introduced to the widowed psychotherapist Julia, a freshly inducted activist whose brush with the crisis playing out in her backyard galvanises her into action.

The activists are united by the clear moral imperative of what they're doing but, within that, a schism separates them: their pragmatic leader Marta prefers to play by the rules as much as she can so their entire operation isn't shut down, which would endanger the asylum seekers even more; her more idealistic sister Zuku and newcomer Julia strive to save each asylum seeker they chance upon, no matter the cost to both sides. Holland is careful to never confer judgement on either camp — both have their clear advantages and drawbacks, but the choice is never easy.

The film's schmaltzy denouement feels hard-earned, but nevertheless at odds with the tone of the preceding scenes. Faith in humanity isn't as easily restored after two-and-a-half hours of witnessing the most grievous human rights abuses.

And then it all comes home in the epilogue, as Holland highlights the preferential treatment that greeted Ukrainian refugees in 2022: Poland has accepted 2.5 million Ukrainian refugees since the Russian invasion. The problem was never one of a dearth of resources or the perceived threat of foreigners — it was that the asylum seekers were Black and Brown.

Green Border is a rallying cry against fascism and state-sanctioned injustice, as much as it champions the capacity of do-gooders to effect very real change in the face of misinformation and xenophobia.

The Belarus-Poland border crisis is playing out in similar ways across the world — notably on Australia's watery borders, as we continue to breach our obligations under international law to accept asylum seekers, even as we contribute in ways big and small to the flagrant human rights abuses forcing them to flee their homes in the first place.

As a Syrian asylum seeker says in the film: "My only sin is to have the world's worst passport."

Green Border is in cinemas now.