,“Green Border” is the strongest film this critic has seen all year: NPR, Agnieszka Holland’s film, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, is about a refugee family trying to escape to Western Europe and the people who try to help and stop them.

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. “Green Border” is the new film by veteran director Agnieszka Holland. It tells the story of a refugee family trying to escape to Western Europe, and the people who try to help and stop them. The film, which premieres this week, won the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival and caused controversy in Dutch Poland. Our general critic John Powers says: It’s the strongest movie he’s seen all year.

JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: Some topics are so disturbing that it’s easy to turn away from them and just not think about them. One of these is the seemingly endless refugee crisis in the world. But when poor, often traumatized people enter your country by the thousands or tens of thousands, it is not enough to avert your eyes. You have to do something.

The complexity of doing anything is at the heart of “Green Border,” a new film that packs a real emotional punch. It’s the crowning achievement of filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, the 75-year-old Polish émigré who has built a long, varied career telling political stories about everything from the Holocaust and Soviet tyranny to the drug war streets of Baltimore in ‘The Wire’ . The Netherlands has always had a keen eye for moral conflicts. And here, as she examines the refugee situation in Eastern Europe, she shows how every choice comes at a certain price.

We open in October 2021, with a Syrian family led by a torture victim named Bashir flying to Belarus, where they expect to cross the green-forested border into Poland and then seek asylum in Sweden. But once they slip through the barbed wire into Poland – we made it, they cheer – they discover that they have actually ended up in a nightmare from which the supposedly enlightened EU will not save them. Instead of providing safe passage, the Polish authorities round them up and dump them back into criminal Belarus, which then picks them up and dumps them back into the Polish forest, again and again in a Kafkaesque cycle complete with beatings and robberies . Their story is powerful enough to carry an entire movie. But Holland expands the canvas to include characters who are on the front lines of dealing with refugees from the Middle East and Africa.

We follow a rookie border guard, Jan, a nice man with a wife and a baby on the way, who is trained to think he is protecting the homeland from terrorists and sex offenders funneled into Poland by Vladimir Putin. We follow a group of activists who assist refugees in rural areas by offering them food, water and medical care. And finally, we follow Julia, a widowed therapist whose surprising encounter with an injured refugee sets her on a heroically risky path. Along the way, characters we like die or do unlikely things, or in some cases disappear into a patrol car and never return. Some come almost randomly from Poland.

For every generous soul like Leila, an Afghan English teacher who shares what she has with her fellow refugees, there is a racist border guard who charges desperately thirsty people 50 euros for a bottle of water and then, after taking their money, charges it up the ground pours before their eyes. Everyone makes difficult choices all the time. For example, the activists help the refugees with food and medicine, which is allowed, but they refuse to help them evade the border guards even if they can. Such an intervention would result in the group not helping any further refugees and potentially imprisoning them for years. Each member of the group has a personal line that determines what they want to do or not do – and the lines change. Although the film has a political kick, one of Holland’s virtues is her sense of reality. Her way of reminding us that even in extreme circumstances, normal life continues. Refugee children bicker like any other child, even when the family is on the run. Julia may risk her career to help an injured man, but she still has to call her desperately ill mother every day. And after Jan and the other border guards have stopped for a day, they drink hard to forget what they have done.

When “Green Border” premiered at festivals last fall, the Netherlands came under attack from the Polish government, which at the time was led by the nativist, ultra-conservative Law and Justice Party, which tended to treat any criticism of its policies as slander , if not as treason. But their words were not meant to deter Holland, who dug her teeth into communism, emigrated to the West to make films more freely and knows her way around bullying governments. She even ends her film with a crushing kicker set on the Ukrainian border in 2022, an open-armed greeting that reveals the Polish government’s selective treatment of refugees. You can feel the moral outrage pulsating under ‘Green Border’, but the Netherlands is too smart a filmmaker to become preachy or sentimental. This is what’s going on in your world, the movie tells us. What do you want to do about it?

MOSLEY: John Powers reviewed the new movie “Green Border.” Tomorrow’s show features Diane von Furstenberg and filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. Chinoy directed a new Hulu documentary about the life of Diane von Furstenberg, how she became a fashion designer and created the wrap dress, and the influence of her Holocaust survivor mother. The documentary is called “Diane Von Furstenberg: Woman In Charge.” I hope you can join us.

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MOSLEY: Follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair to stay up to date with what’s on the show and get highlights of our interviews. The executive producer of FRESH AIR is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Bigger, Lauren Krenzel, Ann Marie Baldonado, Therese Madden, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Joel Wolfram, and Kayla Lattimore. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. This is Terry Gross, I’m Tonya Mosley.

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