A heartbreaking look at refugees

   Polish director Agnieszka Holland (Europa, Europa) takes us to the Polish/Belarusian border in GreenBorder, a gripping look at Syrian refugees desperate to escape their war-torn country.

  Holland avoids the kind of hand-wringing that could have resulted from portrayal of a fraught and polarizing moment, smartly shifting our attention to different aspects of a complex problem.

  — We meet and empathize with a Syrian family — a grandfather, husband, wife, and three kids — who hope to reach Sweden, where they already have a relative.

  —- We’re appalled by the brutality the family faces at the hands of Polish border guards who treat them like a virus that must be prevented from spreading.

   — We also meet a border guard whose wife is pregnant. He represses his conscience so that he can do his job. 

   — We’re introduced to activists who help the refugees at great personal risk. A psychiatrist joins a cause that could bring criminal charges. The activists seem to have as many failures as successes.

   Holland imbues most of her characters with humanity, a choice that works against any temptation to adopt holier-than-thou attitudes toward what we’re seeing.

   The most moving part of the film involves the Syrian family that’s fleeing ISIS. They’ve been misled to think that they’ll find allies in Belarus.

    Dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko offered safe passage to Syrian refugees, but his real intention was to disrupt EU countries by flooding them with desperate migrants.

    Belarusian soldiers push the refugees through razor-wire fences bordering Poland. Polish border guards catch them and force them back into Belarus. At times, the guards throw fleeing refugees over the fence.

  A Syrian boy named Nur (Taim Arian) becomes a focal point of sadness when he’s separated from his family during a border “pushback” from Poland to Belarus.

   Refugees live in a state of sustained fear and panic. They frantically use their cell phones for navigation or to contact relatives who have promised help.

   All of this takes place in the cold and rain with characters on all sides caught in a forest nightmare. 

  The Polish government condemned Holland’s film. Perhaps it should have watched more closely. Holland clearly empathizes with refugees, but she’s presenting a comprehensive portrait of Poles who are trying to deal with an impossible situation. 

   Holland concludes with an epilogue in which she shows Ukrainian refugees arriving in Poland after the Russian invasion. They are greeted warmly by some of the same guards who tormented Syrian refugees, leaving little question that race played a role in the Polish response to some of the refugees.

    Green Border begins with an aerial view of the forest where much of the story will unfold. As the camera glides over the forest, the image fades from color to black-and-white but Holland never takes a black-and-white approach to storytelling. Her movie dramatizes the plight of refugees, but it's also a thought-provoking look at the struggle to retain humanity under extreme conditions.

   Undeniably harsh and sometimes difficult to watch, Green Border is a rarity, a movie that doesn't give up on humanity, even in the face of so much heartbreak and wreckage.

A journalist documents the crimes of Stalin

     In Mr. Jones, Polish director Agnieszka Holland turns her attention to a little known story about a Welsh journalist who worked to expose Joseph Stalin’s murderous crimes in Ukraine. 

      James Norton portrays Jones, a dedicated reporter who early on is dismissed from his job as secretary to prime minister Lloyd George (Kenneth Cranham), a man who tried to ignore Jones’s admonitions about the growing threat of Nazism. 

     After losing his job with George, Jones began working independently, turning his attention to the Soviet Union. He wanted to interview Stalin, an ambition that exceeded the reality of the young journalist's connections. 
     Upon arriving in Moscow, Jones sought help from New York Times journalist Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard), a Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter who showed no interest in exposing the truth about Stalin’s treatment of farmers in Ukraine. As depicted here, an imperious Durante seems too immersed in his dissolute life to challenge the official line.

        It's worth remembering that in the pre-war days in which the story unfolds, some western enthusiasts on the left were lauding the Soviet experiment as an estimable march toward progress. 
           Vanessa Kirby impresses as a writer who tries to warn Jones that he's treading on dangerous ground by insisting on traveling to Ukraine.

       Mired in a variety of intrigues and storylines, the movie often feels scattershot, further muddled by scenes involving George Orwell (Joseph Mawle),  who's working on the novella, Animal Farm.  

     Other plot threads flutter in the winds of a movie that doesn’t become memorable until Jones reaches Ukraine. There he discovers the horrific famine that Stalin inflicted on the populace as punishment for their resistance to collectivization.

     Stalin stole and sold their wheat to finance a five-year plan meant to catapult the Soviet Union into modernity.  Images of terrible suffering, brutal cold, and even famine-induced cannibalism are so hauntingly vivid they tend to put the rest of the movie to shame.

A Pole helps Jews in a dark hour

Director Angnieszka Holland tells a little-known Holocaust story

Not long ago, Poland was regarded -- at least among many Jews of a certain age -- as a bastion of anti-Semitism. I grew up around Jewish people who believed most Poles were secretly (or even openly) happy that the Germans were doing their dirty work for them, eliminating Jews from every aspect of Polish life. It didn’t matter that the first people to die at Auschwitz were Polish political prisoners or that the Germans regarded the Poles as lesser beings. One question resonated above all others: Where were the Poles when most of the country's Jewish population was being annihilated?

During the past 20 or so years, there has been a conscious effort in Poland to come to grips with that image, mostly in the form of new interest in Jewish culture. Warsaw and Krakow host two of the world’s largest Jewish festivals, and in Warsaw, a Jewish history museum is under construction. Poland is making an effort to understand Jewish culture, and to make Polish/Jewish history a part of Polish history.

If one were inclined toward skepticism, one might think of this as a somewhat hollow gesture, Judaism without Jews. The Jewish population of Poland, though growing, remains woefully small. There were 3.3 million Jews in Poland prior to World War II. The number of Jews in Poland today is estimated at between 8,000 to 12,000, and I'm not sure that a generation of younger Poles is as caught up in any of this as their parents may have been.

So where am I going with all this?

At this point, any contemporary movie that grapples with the relationship between Poles and Jews during World War II must be seen in the context of Poland’s evolving mindset about such matters.

All of this makes director Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness part of an ongoing trend that has yet to reach its destination -- if, indeed, it has one, as well as a singular artistic effort.

Holland, who dealt with Holocaust-related issues in Angry Harvest (1985) and Europa, Europa (1990), this time offers a portrait of an initially reluctant hero: Poldek is a Polish sewer inspector who winds up helping a handful of Jews in the city of Lvov, which is now part of the Ukraine, but which belonged to Poland during the war.

In part, In Darkness is made compelling by its setting, the sewers of Lvov, where a small group of Jews hides from the Nazis. It takes a man such as Poldek, who knows how to scavenge and how to negotiate the sewer system, to supply the Jews with food and water -- at first for a price. When the Jews run out of money, Poldek continues to help, perhaps because he begins to see past stereotypes he long has taken for granted.

Holland offers a rounded portrait of the Jews who take to the sewers, where they live in horrible darkness and suffer all the kind of indignities that easily are imagined -- from the inescapable stench to an abundance of rats. The hiding Jews include a couple of kids, a man who abandoned his wife and daughter for his mistress, a religious Jew, a stalwart guy who’s willing to fight and a wealthy man who never dreamed he'd be put in such a position.

Poldek (Robert Wieckiewicz) proves a commanding figure, a gruff, physically powerful man who has become accustomed to doing whatever he must to keep himself, his wife and his young daughter alive during the German occupation. A young sidekick (Krzysztof Skonieczny) helps Poldek and shares in his looted bounty.

I’m always a little wary of stories about Holocaust survival -- even harrowing ones. In essence, the story of the Holocaust is not one of hope and survival, but of mass murder. But Holland's movie -- as its title suggests -- is a grim and affecting exploration of the way people behave under extreme pressure; it also reminds us that when the worst conditions occur, it’s impossible to predict who among us will be capable of acting with decency.