Tag: Syria

Dictator’s ploy traps migrants in deadly quagmire

Leila (Behi Djanati Atai, glasses) and other migrants find themselves at the mercy of hostile border guards. (Photos courtesy of Kino Lorber)

By Richard Ades

The life of a migrant is an unending battle for survival.   

That was the message delivered by 2023’s Io Capitano, the story of two Senegalese teens’ perilous attempt to reach Europe. And it’s a message that comes across even more terrifyingly in Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border.

The acclaimed director sets her tale in a specific time and place: the border between Poland and Belarus in 2021. The year is significant because that’s when Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko encouraged desperate people from around the world to travel to his communist country, where they supposedly would be guaranteed safe passage to Poland and the rest of the European Union.

As the film opens, we meet several people who’ve taken advantage of Lukashenko’s offer by catching a flight to Belarus. Among them are Bashir and Amina (Jalal Altawil and Dalia Naous), a Syrian couple who are traveling with an older relative and three young children. There’s also Leila (Behi Djanati Atai), an Afghan teacher fleeing Taliban persecution.  

Upon landing in Belarus, the Syrians allow Leila to share their prearranged ride to the Polish border. Once there, however, they realize that Lukashenko’s promise of safe passage was a hoax. After being forced to pay a bribe, they’re shoved through an opening in the barbed wire that separates the two hostile countries and left alone in a thick Polish forest with night coming on.

A young migrant girl peers through the barbed wire that separates Poland from Belarus.

But the real shock comes the next day, when they’re discovered by border guards who load them onto a truck and send them back to Belarus.

It soon becomes clear that neither country wants them and that they’re stuck in a kind of limbo, repeatedly being forced back and forth across the barbed-wire frontier. All the while, they’re cheated, derided and even brutalized by the guards and others they encounter.

Basically, this is a horror film, but one that replaces jump scares and gore with an unflinching look at the cruelty ordinary people can inflict on others whom they’ve dismissed as enemies and less than human. In such cases, not even children, elders or pregnant women are deemed worthy of compassion.

Working from a script she co-wrote with Maciej Pisuk and Gabriela Lazarkiewicz, Holland also looks at the migrants’ nightmarish situation from two additional viewpoints. One is through the eyes of Jan (Tomasz Wlosok), a young border guard who’s soon to be a father.

While attending a lecture given by his gung-ho superior, Jan is told that many of the migrants are pedophiles and other deviants, and that all amount to “live bullets” aimed at Poland by the dictator Lukashenko and his Russian buddy, Vladimir Putin. Despite this appeal to prejudice and patriotism, Jan is obviously torn as he goes about a job that frequently offends his sense of decency.

A group of Polish activists search for migrants caught in the no-man’s land between their country and Belarus.

The final viewpoint belongs to a group of activists who work undercover to aid the migrants. A widowed psychotherapist named Julia (Maja Ostaszewska) soon joins them, but she’s dismayed by their ineffectiveness and ultimately decides to take matters into her own hands.

All of the characters are portrayed with discipline and conviction by the cast, whose efforts are complemented by Tomasz Naumiuk’s black-and-white cinematography and Frederic Vercheval’s subtly expressive score.

Eventually, the stories of the migrants and others coalesce in ways that inject slivers of hope into the 2½-hour film. Otherwise, director/co-writer Holland offers few reasons for optimism about the plight of migrants in Europe or anywhere else.

Instead, she suggests that as long as governments can score political points by categorizing these desperate people as a subhuman threat, their suffering will continue.

Rating: 4½ stars (out of 5)

Green Border can be seen at select theaters, with more openings scheduled in the coming weeks. Columbus screenings are scheduled at 7 p.m. Friday, June 28 and 1 p.m. Saturday, June 29 at the Wexner Center for the Arts, and beginning July 5 at the Gateway Film Center. VOD screenings begin Aug. 20.

Klan veteran and Kurdish immigrant form unlikely alliance

Former Klansman Chris Buckley (left) shares a stage with Syrian refugee Heval Kelli in a scene from Refuge. (Photos by Tomesha Foxio)

By Richard Ades

Refuge is the story of the healing that takes place when a former Ku Klux Klan member is befriended by a Muslim refugee.

That’s the way the documentary is billed, at least, though the description is a bit misleading. For one thing, the two men don’t actually meet until late in the film, by which time much of the healing has already taken place.

The former Klan member is Chris Buckley, an Army veteran who lives in LaFayette, Ga., with his wife and two small children. Chris enlisted in the military after 9/11, and his subsequent years of overseas combat duty only added to the hatred and distrust he felt toward Muslims.

More broadly, his ongoing struggle to support his family made him susceptible to the appeal of White nationalism, which encouraged him to blame his problems on people of color, immigrants and other convenient scapegoats. Hence, Chris joined the Klan and began throwing himself into the hate group’s rituals and ideology.

By the time we meet him, however, Chris has left the Klan for reasons that aren’t immediately revealed. He claims he’s trying to put his hatred behind him, though he makes an exception in the case of the religion he blames for his many wartime injuries and for the death of a beloved Army buddy.

Meanwhile, directors Erin Bernhardt and Din Blankenship also introduce us to Heval Kelli, a Muslim Kurd who arrived in the U.S. after his family was forced to flee their native Syria. A cardiologist, Heval lives with his aging parents in Clarkston, a Georgia town two hours away from LaFayette by car—and light years away in terms of environment.

“Mama Amina” works to make newcomers feel at home in the multiethnic community of Clarkston, Ga.

For decades, Clarkston has accepted refugees from various parts of the world, resulting in a community that comprises a multitude of nationalities, languages and religions. All are made to feel welcome thanks to the efforts of warm-hearted residents such as 89-year-old “Mama Amina,” a tireless volunteer.

Chris and Heval eventually meet, of course, though it takes some doing on the part of others to bring it about. In particular, it takes the efforts of Melissa, Chris’s wife, who has her own reasons for hating racism and who emerges as one of the film’s real heroes.

As a record of a Chris’s conversion from a vicious bigot to someone who ends up fighting bigotry, Refuge is sometimes moving, though not quite as moving as it could be. That’s because his transformation largely takes place when the camera isn’t rolling. We see him talking about his change of heart, but we don’t see it actually happening.

But that’s a minor weakness, and besides, the documentary has plenty of other attributes. Among them are the scenes in Clarkston, where rampant displays of kindness and acceptance offer a welcome break from the divisiveness that characterizes much of modern society.

The atmosphere is so intoxicating that not even the arrival of an anti-immigrant gubernatorial candidate and his so-called “deportation bus” can spoil the mood. The candidate apparently realizes that as, after accepting a welcoming piece of baclava, he takes his leave.

If only hatred and bigotry could always be turned away that easily.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Refuge opens March 24 at select theaters and through VOD outlets.