Divided by Walls, United by Humanity: Refugee Stories in Polish Film

06.jpg, default, Still from ‘Zielona granica’, directed by Agnieszka Holland, photo: Agata Kubis / Kino Świat

A feminist documentary about a Kurdish teenager and a story of a lost paradise built in the Białowieża Forest. A famous, scandalising film by Agnieszka Holland, a student animation stylised as children’s drawings and finally, short stories about an encounter with an Other. Here are the best Polish films about the crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border.

‘Las’, directed by Lidia Duda (2024)

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Still from ‘Las’, directed by Lidia Duda, 2024, photo: LUMISENT press materials

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No one before had managed to depict the migration crisis with such maturity and tenderness. Describing the drama of refugees, Lidia Duda has created the best Polish documentary of 2024. Full of tenderness, insightful, moving and at the same time devoid of elements of moral blackmail, her film hurts and delights and above all forces us to take an honest look in the mirror.

In Las (Forest) we will not find traces of a reporter’s fever. We will not see here any evil border guards, cynical politicians, supporters or opponents of immigration. Lidia Duda is interested not in explaining political or social contexts but in people. She places a family in the centre of the frame – two young parents who left for the Białowieża Forest to create an ideal place for their three children. Thanks to Duda’s sensitivity and the beautiful photos by Zuzanna Zachary-Hassairi, we can become residents of their private paradise for several dozen minutes. The director movingly shows the happiness of a simple life: a nap with a child, playing together in the open air, working in an apiary… But dark clouds gather over this Arcadia – in addition to bison and moose, a passing man is captured by a camera trap. A few days later, a father and his children find abandoned sleeping bags in the forest, a cap lost by a refugee hiding there… The outside world begins to penetrate the private space of the film’s characters. It is impossible to close your eyes to what is happening in the forest nearby. And so Asia and Marek rush to help…

Las becomes a story about triumphant humanity, about selflessness and acting on the impulse of a sincere heart. This semi-whispered story of a family moves more than all the TV reports explaining the root causes of the refugee crisis. Duda is interested in the world seen through the eyes of ordinary people. The scene in which several-year-old children sit with Lego blocks, playing at deporting refugees, is one of those that cannot be forgotten after it is seen – because Lidia Duda created a wise and beautiful film saturated with humanism and at the same time one that very consciously uses the film form.

‘Zielona granica’, directed by Agnieszka Holland (2023)

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Still from ‘Zielona granica’, directed by Agnieszka Holland, photo: Agata Kubis / Kino Świat

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No other film in recent years has divided the Polish audience as much as Zielona granica (Green Border). Directed by Agnieszka Holland, this drama about refugees from the Polish-Belarusian border, the activists who rescue them and the cruelty of the border guard polarized both critics and viewers. Some saw it as a humanistic masterpiece, which was confirmed by numerous prestigious awards, while others considered the director to be a public enemy, leading to a situation in which the artist was afraid to leave her home. All this made rational discussion of Holland’s film almost impossible for many months after its premiere.

The film by the director of Gorączka (Fever) opens up many areas for discussion. Divided into four parts, Zielona granica is an uneven film. While the story of a family of refugees who end up on the Polish-Belarusian border is moving and sensitizes us to the refugee drama, the subsequent parts of the story are full of naivety and journalistic simplifications. These are particularly visible in the sequence devoted to the work of the Border Guard, which the opponents of the film used as an example of hate mongering against the ‘Polish uniform’.

In Lidia Duda’s documentary, human fate turns out to be more important than politics, while in Holland’s film there is a clear division into good and bad, culprits and victims. Zielona granica is sometimes glaring with its insistence and feeling of political righteousness. And although Agnieszka Holland’s film, which won awards in Venice, claims to be a defence speech delivered on behalf of the defenceless and weak, it loses all its subtlety and emotional truth when it comes to filing an indictment. And if Agnieszka Holland’s film goes down in the history of Polish cinema, it will be more because of its Moczar-style political attacks and the collective hysteria it caused than because of its cinematic class.

‘Dzewa milczą’, directed by Agnieszka Zwiefka (2024)

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Drzewa milczą | Silent Trees | Sirens

Runa is sixteen years old, has three younger brothers and a father who cannot find his way in a new reality. They came from Kurdistan through Belarus, and in Poland they applied for asylum and the right to stay. Not everyone managed to survive: the girl’s mother froze to death in the forest on the Polish-Belarusian border. Now the teenage Runa must become the head of the family and try to rebuild her life and that of her loved ones.

In telling her story, Agnieszka Zwiefka creates a film that is beautiful and cruel at the same time. She takes us to the very heart of the refugee drama but is not eager to join tribal battles and effectively escapes the identity trap. In the world she talks about, there is no black and white, which so strongly characterizes Agnieszka Holland’s Zielona granica. This is a drama in various shades of grey, the prose of the lives of people condemned to vegetate in refugee centres. In Zwiefka’s picture, the fate of immigrants is marked by cruelty, but there are also glimmers of hope – people who help, who are selflessly patient and devoted to others.

Zwiefka speaks quietly, sometimes as if in a whisper. She is more interested in people than in politics. The moving helplessness of a forty-year-old father who cannot find a job in Poland without knowing the language. The pain of children who visit their mother’s grave in the cemetery in Kruszyniany. And the embarrassed little boy who does not want to admit that he has recently met his first girlfriend. In Drzewa milczą (Silent Trees), the director once again (as in Królowa ciszy [The Queen of Silence] and Vice) gives voice to a strong woman, creating an ambiguous feminist story. The film, dedicated to 55 identified victims who died of hypothermia on the Polish-Belarusian border, is a beautiful tribute to forgotten, nameless people.

‘Mur’, directed by Kasia Smutniak (2023)

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Still from ‘Mur’, directed by Kasia Smutniak, 2023, photo: producer’s press materials

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Kasia Smutniak, an outstanding actress who with Mur (Walls) made her debut as a documentarian, said in an interview with Vogue:

The theme of the film is that of tangible and intangible walls. Barriers that we build to separate ourselves from someone. But also those emotional barriers in us that protect us from seeing too much. Because if we see too much, we will become indifferent.

She first arrived with a camera on the Polish-Belarusian border during the winter of 2022. Shortly afterwards, a full-scale war broke out in Ukraine, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees found shelter in Poland. In the documentary Mur, Smutniak registered this paradox but focused on the fate of those who, freezing to death in the forests of Białowieża, became victims of a political game by Lukashenka and Putin. The director created a two-hour film out of 180 hours of footage. She gave up on the most brutal images of dying, exhausted people, yet her film is still incredibly powerful. Instead, Smutniak showed people providing help: a Polish translator helping refugees for months, activists coordinating the work of various groups and a local construction worker who brings refugees warm clothes, medicine and hot tea at night. By telling their story, Smutniak showed that it is impossible to turn a blind eye to the suffering of innocent people, and in a situation of crisis that has been going on for years, passivity turns out to be an unforgivable sin.

‘W lesie są ludzie’, directed by Szymon Ruczyński (2023)

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Still from 'There Are People in the Forest', directed by Szymon Ruczyński, 2023, photo: National Film School in Łódź.

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The crisis taking place on the Polish-Belarusian border, on which documentary and feature films feed so eagerly, also sometimes happens to be a subject for animation, as evidenced by Szymon Ruczyński’s ten-minute student film. The young director, born in Hajnówka and raised in Białowieża, tells the story of refugees and residents of the borderlands whom circumstances turn into witnesses of refugee tragedies, rescuers and sometimes helpless observers of tragedies happening ‘on the other side of the fence’.

Ruczyński knows this world, which is why he does not speak with superiority, does not hand out diplomas or reprimands but tries to show human dramas. The director, who in 2021 and 2022 was himself involved in helping immigrants in the Białowieża Forest, combines artistic ‘naivety’ with a cruel awareness of the drama he describes. He uses a simple line that may bring to mind Christmas drawings made by children’s hands, but the story he tells is far from naive. The film’s refugees make their way through the forest only to be taken back to the ‘start’ after being captured by the Border Guard – as if in a cruel computer game, where the chances of victory are slim and the end of the game is death from hypothermia. W lesie są ludzie (There Are People in the Forest), presented at the Kraków Film Festival and the Warsaw Film Festival, among others, is a moving story about hope and about the people who try to salvage it.

‘Do raju’, directed by Marta Szymanek (2023)

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Still from ‘Do raju’, directed by Marta Szymanek, 2023, photo: Warsaw Film School

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Mila (Natalia Jędruś) is 17 years old and fed up with life. She lives right next to the eastern border of Poland, and her family makes a living by smuggling. The girl, immersed in depression, decides to end her life. She tries to suffocate on exhaust fumes in a car parked on a forest road. Her plan is thwarted by the appearance of a young Syrian refugee (played by Nadim Suleiman, known from Damian Kocur’s Chleb i sól [Bread and Salt]), who decides to prevent the teenager from carrying out her suicidal plan.

This is the beginning of the story told in the short film Do raju (Eden) by Marta Szymanek, a screenwriter known from the series Wataha (The Border) and Odwilż (Thaw), for whom Do raju is her first step as a director. In an interview with Marta Ossowska from WP (TV channel), the director said:

I really like it when cinema tells the story of a clash of two distant poles. I felt that if a girl who sees no meaning in her life and is at the stage of giving up were to meet someone who is fighting for survival at all costs, this would awaken something special in her and perhaps awaken similar feelings in the audience.

In her debut film, Szymanek combines the story of accelerated maturation and that of refugees. And although combining these two topics does not always work, Do raju captivates with the empathy and seriousness with which the director treats her teenage protagonist, weaving a story about how ‘Eden is where two people see each other with all their weaknesses’.

Szymanek’s short film (presented at the Gdynia Film Festival and elsewhere) is the result of the personal experiences of the director and her husband, producer and screenwriter Piotr Szymanek, who, after the outbreak of the migration crisis, became involved in helping refugees on the Polish-Belarusian border.

‘Dalej jest dzień’, directed by Damian Kocur (2020)

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Still from ‘Dalej jest dzień’, directed by Damian Kocur, 2020, photo: producer’s press materials: Damian Kocur & Michał Sadowski

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Although Damian Kocur’s film Dalej jest dzień (Beyond Is the Day) was made before the crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border became exacerbated, it could not be left off our list. The young director created one of the most beautiful stories about refugees and salvaged humanity.

Its protagonist is sixty-year-old Paweł (Paweł Bloch, a non-professional who has been playing in Kocur’s films for years), who works on a river ferry somewhere on the edge of a small village. One day, when he is finishing his shift, he finds a man in the water – a refugee from the Middle East hiding from the border guards. In an act of solidarity, he gives him shelter and a warm meal.

This is how the story of two men begins, one of whom does not speak Polish, and the other does not understand a word of a foreign language. Despite this, they talk to each other – they tell vivid anecdotes, laugh together at jokes they do not comprehend. They understand each other. Or rather – they want to understand each other. Complete strangers, utterly different, for a brief moment creating a beautiful, two-person community.

Because Kocur is not interested in migration as a geopolitical or social problem, he looks at these two people with their own dramas, loneliness they try to soothe and cordiality, which in his film is capable of saving the world. Kocur’s bittersweet film, not devoid of comedic tones, is not only a sample of his extraordinary sensitivity but also proof (not the first and not the last in the young artist’s filmography) that the director of Chleb i sól (Bread and Salt) is a true storyteller who has great control over the rhythm of the images he creates, can transform a small story into a great filmic account and can change an intimate portrait into a story about the condition of contemporary human beings.

‘Gość’, directed by Zuzanna Solakiewicz & Zvika Gregory Portnoy

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Still from ‘Gość’, directed by Zuzanna Solakiewicz, 2024, photo: producer’s press materials

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In the last months of 2024, Zuzanna Solakiewicz and Zvika Gregory Portnoy, with their Gość (The Guest), joined the group of filmmakers who have used the cinema screen to tell the story of the drama taking place on the Polish-Belarusian border.

Awarded at the IDFA festival in Amsterdam, one of the most prestigious events of world documentary, Solakiewicz and Portnoy’s film is the story of the refugee crisis told from an unusual perspective. Its main protagonists are two men: Maciek, a Pole around forty years old living on the outskirts of the Białowieża Forest, and Alhyder, a Syrian almost fifteen years younger than he who tried to cross from Belarus into the European Union. They met in the forest, and the refugee, completely soaked and nearly dying from hypothermia, ended up under the roof of his new Polish friend. Since then, both of them have been trapped – as long as Alhyder stays in Maciek’s house, he is safe. However, if one day he tries to leave it, he will have to avoid military patrols and border guards, who send people like him to the other side of the Polish-Belarusian fence. Thus, the title’s ‘guest’ is at the same time a prisoner of the situation in which he finds himself and which he knows cannot last forever. Maciek and Alhyder face the question: what next, how to get out of the situation without endangering the life of the Syrian refugee or abusing the hospitality of Maciek and his family.

This documentary film by Solakiewicz and Portnoy (made in cooperation with Michał Bielawski) does an excellent job of showing this conflict. If only it were possible to forget that we are watching a tragically true story, we could think that this is another of Roman Polański’s ‘theatrical’ films, the likes of Carnage or Venus in Furs written for the roles of a refugee and a Polish forty-year-old. The authors create a film that is deeply moving and that shows the tragedy of the refugee crisis, while at the same time being subversive and very funny – because Gość is a documentary gem, a story about people who choose not to conform to the heartless rules of big politics, while at the same time it is an unassuming story of triumphant humanity. Awarded for best cinematography (by Zvika Gregory Portnoy), this intimate portrait of two protagonists is one of the best documentaries of 2024.

Translated from Polish by Michał Abel-Pelczar

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polish cinema

polish film

refugees