Silent Trees, dir. Agnieszka Zwiefka

Agnieszka Zwiefka’s documentary story about refugees from the Polish-Belarusian border is stripped of political slogans and journalistic simplifications. ‘Silent Trees’ is beautiful and painfully honest cinema. The film premiered on 21st March at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, one of the most important documentary festivals in the world.

Runa is 16 years old, has three younger brothers and a father who cannot find his way in their new reality. Her mother is dead – she froze to death in the forest on the Polish-Belarusian border. Now it is up to the teenage girl to become the head of the family and try to rebuild her life and that of her loved ones.

In telling her story, Agnieszka Zwiefka does not compromise with the truth. Kacper Czubak’s camera takes us to the place where a humanitarian tragedy is occurring, one that has been exploited for months in political wars and media manipulations. The film’s opening sequence of shots from the Białowieża Forest may seem strangely familiar, as if we have seen the brutal border guards, the armed Belarusians intimidating terrified people, the blinding lights of stroboscopic lamps, snow-covered tents of refugees and a metal fence separating the European Union from the rest of the world somewhere before. We saw the same scenes in Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border, but then they were accompanied by political comments about the director’s lies, manipulation of facts and anti-Polish optics behind the film. In Zwiefka’s case, similar accusations do not hold water. Not only because the director shows documentary material whose veracity cannot be questioned, but also because her film successfully escapes the trap of identity-based divisions.

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Drzewa milczą | Silent Trees | Sirens

In this world, there is none of the black and white thinking which marked Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border so strongly. There is a drama with different shades of grey, the mundane life of people condemned to vegetate in refugee centres. The cruelty meted out to refugees at the border in Agnieszka Zwiefka’s documentary story is contrasted with the way in which the film’s protagonists – a family fleeing Kurdistan plagued by ISIS terrorists – are received at a refugee centre. Staff and volunteers come to them with an open heart, helping them, patiently teaching them. Silent Trees is a story about people, but also about a non-functioning immigration system (at school, Kurdish children listen to a lesson about Bolesław Krzywousty, delivered in Polish). And although Zwiefka is not interested in journalism, the director does not pretend that the subject of the Polish-Belarusian border and the refugees dying on it is not a political topic. Every now and then, from radio sets and YouTube videos, we hear the words of politicians who, in a confident tone, make unequivocal assessments and present radical solutions to the immigration problem.

Fortunately, the director does not reason by shouting out loud. She 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, without knowing the language, cannot find a job in Poland. The pain of a family visiting the grave of their mother and wife in the Kruszyniany cemetery. And the embarrassment of a young boy who does not want to admit that he has just recently met his first girlfriend.

For the director, however, Runa is the most interesting, with her loneliness, her need to fight and her ability to sacrifice herself for the good of her family. Zwiefka finds in her what has always interested her in female characters: sensitivity and strength. Like previous female protagonists of the Wrocław director’s films, Runa expresses herself through art. While the protagonist of Vika!, ‘Poland’s oldest DJ’, challenged her age and the surrounding world, and in the moving The Queen of Silence, a Roma girl with a hearing impairment showed her emotions through dance modelled on the choreography of large-scale Bollywood, Runa expresses herself through drawings. In her spare time, she draws beautiful, sensual sketches in her notebook.

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A still from the film The Trees Are Silent, dir. Agnieszka Zwiefka; photo: distributor's press materials

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The director of the documentary not only shows them on screen, but introduces an elaborate element of visualisation into her film. Again and again, Runa’s drawings come to life (thanks to animations created by Yellow Tapir, a company headed by the excellent Marcin Podolec), becoming a moving illustration of the character’s emotional states. In short animated sequences, we watch her growing fears, a sense of being overwhelmed, longing for freedom and innocence, and finally – traumatic memories of the forest where her mother died.

The animated sequences, with their metaphorical bluntness (images reminiscent of Kafka’s The Trial), time and again take away some of the film’s natural charm and lightness. They add to what the viewer could have guessed anyway, following Zwiefka’s documentary story. The director of The Queen of Silence also demonstrates unusual sensitivity and directorial talent. For example, when she notices a reflection of their tragic experiences in the Białowieża Forest in a sequence of Kurdish boys playing by the still cold Baltic Sea. The image of a little boy’s chilled feet suddenly takes us from the idyllic beaches of Sopot to the swampy forests of the Polish-Belarusian borderland, the place of this child’s greatest life tragedy.

Agnieszka Zwiefka dedicated her film to the 55 victims identified so far who died of hypothermia on the Polish-Belarusian border, including the mother of her film’s characters. Her Silent Trees is a beautiful tribute to these people and an attempt to remind us about them. A film that is painful and beautiful at the same time, and above all – extremely honest.

Silent Trees. Polish title: Drzewa Milczą. Written and directed by: Agnieszka Zwiefka. Cinematography: Kacper Czubak. Music: Niklas Paschburg. Editing: Michał Buczek. Premiere: 21.03.2024.

refugees

Agnieszka Holland